With 70 per cent of the internet population watching videos online, a comScore report reveals that users beyond 15 years of age watched online video in India either from home or from workplace, with an average viewer consuming 58 videos and watching five hours of video content in a month.
Betting on the availability of 3G services and high-speed broadband in India, social video aggregator Shufflr.tv has fine-tuned its video-discovery platform to Twitter enabling users to see what videos are shared on Twitter and by whom. “So, if Britney Spears shares a video on Twitter, you can view those on Shufflr and post your comments to her Twitter feed about the video directly on Shufflr,” explains Rajnish, one of the founder members of Althea Systems, developers of Shufflr. Integrating celebrities’ Twitter profile and videos that they share online is perhaps Shufflr’s biggest advantage as it makes it easier to discover content shared.
Available as a free app for Android phones, Apple iPhone and iPad, it can also be downloaded from the Web on Shufflr.tv. With hopes to simplify online video discovery and consumption across mobile phones, PCs and tablet PCs, Shufflr will deliver integrated video content to a user shared by his friends on social networks like Twitter and Facebook.
After two years , Althea Systems came up with an app that can browse videos from the Web and sort them. “In India, we are in talks with a leading telecom operator to launch Shufflr for 3G users who are demanding video services,” says Rajnish.
Eager to launch Shufflr in India on mobiles, engineers at Althea spent last one year making the app intuitive. “Shufflr can make video suggestions based on users' social media footprints and viewing history. In fact, we create ghost profiles of users on Shufflr, based on their social activity and suggest only those videos that would streamline only the most relevant content,” claims Rajnish.
Althea Systems takes pride in the knowledge that that big-daddy of online video Google's YouTube is keeping a close eye on their product. “We have users from Google [office in the US] using the Shufflr app, which shows us that they are well-aware of what we are doing to video sharing,” concludes Rajnish.