Finding quality video content on the web is hard. There’s too much porn, or too many lolcats derivatives, and not enough crazy music videos involving LEGOs. Following John’s Posterous is one good way to find serendipitous content you might enjoy, but there’s only one John, and he does occasionally sleep. If only someone would make an app to crowdsource my web viewing, so that only the best of the best floats up to my screen. Oh, look! Redux does exactly that. And today they’re announcing their new Boxee app, to bring all that great content to your television, so you can passively enjoy all that the web has to offer without all that tedious typing and clicking!
Redux’s mission is to provide the best Web content with the least amount of work. By combining Redux and Boxee, we are truly bringing the television experience to web content and bringing only the best of the web to your TV. With Boxee pushing 1 million users, and the Boxee Box on the way, Redux will truly be a Boxee lover’s best friend.
I’ve been playing with a beta version of the app for a couple of days, and I must admit that Redux offers a whole new way to enjoy the marvels of Internet video. You don’t have to spend time looking at poorly titled related videos to decide which one you want to watch next; you don’t have to manually switch to full-screen mode for each video; and most of all you don’t have to think. This is passive entertainment of a sort not previously available with Internet content.
It’s not the kind of thing I’m likely to use every day, and it’s not the kind of thing I’m likely to watch for more than 20 or 30 minutes, but when you’re in the mood for something crazy, and you’re not particularly fussy about watching a specific video, Redux will take care of you. According to Redux CEO David McIntosh, most of their users watch on average 60 or 70 minutes worth of content per session.
Boxee’s Avner Ronen is all about the Redux app:
I love Redux on Boxee. It takes the pressure off me to decide exactly what I want to watch, and gives me channels of content around some of my favorite subjects like WTF videos or great music. Redux is pushing the limits of the space and really experimenting with what TV could be.
Users can create their own channels to fill any content niche. It’s trivially easy to subscribe to multiple channels to fine-tune the selection of videos you receive, or you can open up the firehose and watch everything that’s coming through.
The first iteration of the Redux Boxee app is primarily a conduit for watching content, so all of the social aspects of the Redux website — giving props, sharing links on Twitter or Facebook, etc — are currently absent. McIntosh assured me that many of those features would be forthcoming, making Redux the app to use on Boxee.