We’ve been following video discovery startup Showyou since its very earliest days. The company has created an app that makes it easier for video viewers on a mobile phone or tablet to find new content, and share it with friends. Now Showyou wants to use the app and its audience to give video creators and curators a way to build their own channels and monetize them.
So the company has built the Showyou Channels, which will allow anyone to create and distribute their own collections of videos. Oh yeah, and also to monetize them.
Showyou Channels will enable a new level of personalization within the app, allowing owners to create a (somewhat) customized channel page with a choice of background, featured image, and the like. The channel feature will also provide analytics around what videos people are viewing within a channel and how much.
Oh, did I mention that it will also allow channel owners to run ads in those channels? That will take the form of promoted videos, which basically run as interstitials within a playlist. There will also be bumpers available for those who like bumpers.
From the viewer side, Showyou Channels will provide a new way to discover content. The new, updated app works by making channels a core part of the experience. Whenever a user clicks on a video that is part of a channel, they will not only see that video, but will be taken within that channel itself and streamed a playlist of videos from it.
Anyone will be able to make a channel of videos, but Showyou’s hope is that it will be able to get content creators to build channels as a way to distribute their videos. While Showyou won’t host the videos itself — it’ll pull them in from YouTube, Vimeo, or platforms like Brightcove or Ooyala — acting as a new distribution outlet for those content owners.
Channels will be rolled out under a freemium model, where anyone is free to build them, but Showyou will charge for additional features. That pricing starts as low as $5 a month, for a certain number of views and access to ad features, but scales up for those (like big media companies) who might want to have multiple channels.