When I first unboxed the new 1080p Apple TV and plugged it in, I wasn't blown away. Having used a Boxee Box for the last 16 months, I've come to expect flexibility and a broad selection of content sources from my streaming set-top boxes. In fact, after several minutes of playing around with it, I was tempted to box it back up and send it back. Then I tried AirPlay. Mirroring my iPad's display on the TV screen, I was suddenly able to not only stream any video I could find, but look at photos, browse the Web and view other apps on the big screen. If the Apple TV has a killer feature, this is it. Some of the device's biggest shortcomings - limited content, lack of a keyboard for text input, no Web browser - are instantly alleviated once you toggle that AirPlay switch. While you can technically beam Read More

The folks at Showyou have just pushed out the 3.0 version of the social video app and it now includes multiple user interface tweaks and new features. For those who don’t know, Showyou is an app that scours your Twitter and Facebook feeds to find what videos are being shared. These videos are mainly being pulled in from YouTube but Showyou has also cut deals with the likes of Viacom to directly stream clips like the Colbert Report with the app. The company launched its iPad app about nine months ago and has been happy with the results so far: the average user has a session time of more than half an hour and most of the usage is found during the weekend and at night. This is different from usual Internet traffic patterns, which peak during the day. “This shows we’re welcoming the iPad into our weekends and evenings in Read More

Social video browsing app Showyou just launched version 3.0 of its iPad application, a major update with a ton of new features. Competing in a hot space with competitors like Fanhattan, Shelby.tv, Squrl, Vodio and others, Showyou offers a grid-like view for browsing the videos your friends are sharing on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube and Vimeo. Once connected, you can watch any of the over 30 million videos indexed by the Showyou search engine. With version 3.0, four months in the making, the focus is offering users a better way to find content and new ways to drill down deeper into their favorite videos and topics. The Showyou application now pulls in over 5,000,000 videos retrieved from users’ Facebook and Twitter feeds per day, and includes nearly 700,000,000 “social signals” (data from tweets, other metadata) in its search index. According to founder Mark Hall, Showyou is now handling a video volume of Read More

When you see as many apps as we do at RWW, you begin to feel like it's all been done. So many of the everyday jobs for apps to do can already be done by at least one app (if not dozens). How many ways can you share photos with your friends? How many social networks and check-ins and restaurant-discovery services do we need? Lately, we've started to see a new class of app emerge just for managing these tasks across their various apps. The idea of apps for our apps sounds ridiculous, but some of them are neat, and some are downright lifesavers. Here's a round-up of apps you should use if you want to bring your many social networks into one dedicated place. Viewing Photos A photo app called Pixable exists just to pull the photos from your Facebook and Twitter feeds into one attractive place. It allows further Read More

When Showyou first launched last April, we noted that it was sort of like a Flipboard for video content. A new update out today kicks it up a notch by making things more visually appealing while adding more content and making it easier to find. Version 2.0 of Showyou features a redesigned iPad UI that is really fantastic looking. The grid-like look existed before, but now it’s smoother and easier to manipulate. It feels like the way video browsing should be done on a tablet. Most recent videos are in the upper left and you move over and down to move through time. The grid concept remains key. And the new version expands upon it adding content from new, large publishers such as The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, TED, BBC, and others. Each of these publishers now has their own grid that you can subscribe to with one click. And you can Read More

The video-sharing app ShowYou is continuing to roll out improvements to its platform, with couple of new features today including the ability to view it on more screens - thanks to a new browser version of the app. The Web version is similar to the iPad and iPhone app. You can scroll through and view the videos that are in your social streams - shared by you and your Twitter followers, Facebook friends, YouTube network and so on. The browser-based version lacks the rich browsing experience that you get with the iPad touchscreen version. You can arrow up and down your stream, but it's not quite the same. But with the other new features added today, having a Web version makes a lot of sense. There's now a bookmarklet that will let you share videos from YouToube, Vimeo, and TEDTalks to ShowYou, as well as to Twitter or Facebook. Even better, Read More