Showyou: An iPad Experience for Shared Videos

Watching videos your friends recommend on Facebook and Twitter can be awkward. You often lose your place on the page, or have to grab headphones, or want to come back to something when you have more time later. Or all of the above.

Showyou is a new iOS app with an imaginative interface built for social video consumption. It’s meant for spurts of time dedicated to watching videos.

The main Showyou view is a never-ending tiled video wall intended primarily for use on the iPad. Scroll horizontally or vertically and you’ll find videos shared by your friends (the organization seems somewhat random, but more recent videos are generally up and to the left, and popular older videos are down and to the right). Click on a video and it pops out from the wall and plays immediately.

Videos keep loading on one page as you move, giving the (somewhat overwhelming!) sensation that there are infinite options to watch. It might be disconcerting not to have a playlist function or a way to filter videos by any sort of topic, but Showyou does also offer a more traditional feed view that shows just the activity of other Showyou users you follow.

The app comes from San Francisco-based Remixation, a True Ventures-backed start-up which for the last four years has been working on a video curation tool called Vodpod. Vodpod still exists, but the Remixation team has in the last six months shifted almost entirely to work on Showyou, in part inspired by iPad consumption experiences like Flipboard.

At launch, Showyou only supports YouTube, Vimeo and TED videos (in part because they are available in HTML5 for display on iOS). There are also a smattering of social tools in the app, so you can click to share a video, “thank” your friends or comment on videos within Showyou. And Showyou is living-room-ready at launch–that is, if you have Apple TV 2.0 with Airplay.