Hyper Brings You The Best Of Internet Video, Every Day

Hyper, a curated video discovery platform, is launching today to provide you with a daily dose of the best short-form video content that the Internet has to offer.

Powered by $1.1 million in seed funding from Advancit Capital, Lowercase Capital, Broadway Video Ventures, Freelands Ventures and Mesa Ventures, film producer Markus Gilles and cinematographer Jonas Brandau left Berlin’s independent film scene to build Hyper earlier this year.

“We’re living in an Internet world where we have more awesome short-form video content than ever, but at the same time it’s harder and harder to find it amongst the trendy clickbait,” says Gilles. “That stuff bubbles up in our social media streams and algorithm-based recommendations because our friends have already fallen victim to it.”

Sure, YouTube can be useful for watching grizzly bears roll down hills, but for those of us who are looking for something a bit more intellectually substantial, it can take more time to hunt down short-form videos than it does to actually watch them.Gif_Hyper_Brand

To sift through the heaps of crappy video content for us, Hyper has employed a team of journalists and filmmakers who hand-select anywhere from six to a dozen videos each day and package them into a visually appealing digital magazine of sorts.

The videos range from one to twenty minutes in duration and span a broad variety of topics, from artsy foodie videos to emotionally draining war-zone documentaries.

The goal, Gilles says, is to select videos that most people can learn from and appreciate, even if the subject matter is something they wouldn’t typically be drawn to.

Since the team doesn’t post anything that’s more than a couple of days old, the selection process relies heavily on personal taste instead of number of views or social sharing metrics.

“Sometimes the curation is much more obvious than you might think,” Gilles says. “Often we look back and see that these videos are the ones that performed extraordinarily well, way before an algorithm could detect that.”

Video content aggregation and curation is a crowded space, but Gilles believes his team’s film background and obsession over user experience gives Hyper an edge over existing discovery tools within sites like Vimeo and YouTube. Considering that Hyper’s small editorial team drives much of the product’s value, however, the company will face the challenge of maintaining its voice and underground artistic appeal as it scales.

Hyper is currently only available for iPad, but the company plans to roll out an iPhone version in the coming months.