Launch News: Watchlater v2.1
User testimonial: “I’m totally in love with this app. Every time I go on a trip, and there have been quite a lot recently, I load all kinds of crap on my iPad, to keep myself entertained while I’m jammed into an economy class seat in 30.000 feet.” (link)
Watchlater has since their launch been called “Instapaper for video”, but with the new version, the comparison “Tivo for web videos” is even more apt. In the V2.1, Watchlater adds search, social bookmarking and asynchronous loading to help out users with large video folders. The UI has also been redone.
Adding video search from inside the app was an important addition. “We added that feature because the most mainstream users didn’t get the workflow of the app. They want to have an open-discover-watch experience and the whole bookmarklet thing can seem a bit complicated,” says Sebastian Deutsch, Watchlater co-founder.
The app has won over power users and is ready to hit the mainstream. There are over 2.7 million bookmarks now, and by the end of the month this will be over 3 million. You would need over 250 days to watch all of it - if you were to do it 24/7. The wealth of data makes it possible to figure out what videos are relevant to users and what are not.
Conclusion? Rambo Catgun.
“With almost 2.7 million bookmarks we have tremendous knowledge of which videos are relevant and which are not.” Watchlater makes some of this data public: you can see the most popular videos bookmarked by the Watchlater users here.
The app is free, comes with 60 minutes of free video converting and caching, and can be downloaded for the iPhone and iPad here.
This is first in the series of fresh launch news from the HackFwd camp. There are three more coming up this week - to make sure you don’t miss any, sign up for our newsletter.
