June 20th, 2007
VeohTV - The killer desktop application for video?
Veoh announced VeohTV today (TechCrunch coverage) and I got a chance to check out the briefing and get a tour of the service. The new application is a downloadable player that aims to take the web video experience full screen and has a bunch of features including:
- Searching Veoh and other popular video sites
- Adding your own video RSS feeds
- The ability to download web videos onto your hard drive Tivo-style
- Organizing and tagging features from within the desktop app
- A BitTorrent downloader
This is definitely a shot at Joost, but Veoh has a bit more freedom than Joost has. Whereas Joost limits you to channels that they’ve set up, with VeohTV, the entire web can become a channel. In the demo that I saw, VeohTV went out to Fox’s video site and grabbed video to stream directly onto the TV. The interface is all controlled using a remote, so this is meant to be something of a media center application - all powered by web video.
Another cool tie in was the partnership with yourminis. There is an Interact tab in the interface that lets you shrink the movie and see information about it. This section includes tabs from Yourminis that are dynamically pulling content based on what you’re watching. If you’re watching a video about Mummies, the yourminis widgets will go out and grab content about mummies. So you’ll have the del.icio.us widget show mummy content and the amazon.com widget will get books about mummys. It’s an interesting use of the widget platform and it’s all built into the VeohTV desktop.
The download is currently only available for Windows but a Mac version is coming. I should have some beta invites this week so if you’re interested in checking it out, leave me a comment. I really like what they’ve done and think it’s a great example of the continued blend of web apps and desktop apps.
See Also:
paidContent.org
NewTeeVee
Read/WriteWeb
Ryan Stewart, a Rich Internet Application developer and industry analyst, recently joined Adobe's Platform Team as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist. full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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