One of these days, someone’s going to crack the puzzle of how to sort through all the gazillions of videos available online and on connected devices. In the meantime, I’m just going to keep writing about all the wonderful apps that are seeking to do just that. Frequency is another of those video discovery apps. While it already existed on the iPad, the app is now making its debut on the iPhone.
While the startup has an iPad app and is also on connected TVs from Samsung, Frequency’s new iPhone app extends its personalized video discovery platform to another mobile device. Frequency is designed to let users quickly and easily sign-in with Facebook Connect and get to watching a feed of videos that have been shared by their Facebook friends.
But it also provides a way for users to better personalize the viewing experience by adding channels of content that they’re interested in watching, from thousands of individual content providers, as well as on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. And those videos can be watched via AirPlay on the Apple TV.
Unlike other video discovery apps, some of which specialize in premium content streamed by the likes of Netflix and Hulu, Frequency is focused mainly on the wide world of free, ad-supported video available on YouTube, Vimeo, and other distributors. It still looks to connect users with hot videos trending on social channels, but also allows them to follow their favorite content providers on those platforms.
The startup indexes more than 500 million posts on various social networks, and routinely adds more than 250,000 videos to its index per day. That’s more than 20,000 hours of new video content to sort through.
It uses social channels as its primary discovery mechanism, but it also allows users to give back, with all the usual social sharing tools — posting to Facebook or sending video recommendations by email or SMS. Users can also bookmark their videos for viewing later.