Photo slideshows for TVs suck. With Apple TV promising to rethink the way we watch TV, isn’t it time that someone changed how we view our own photo and video content? Storehouse is on it.
Last time we heard from Storehouse they were launching major updates for their app that ditched the social networking functionality and replaced them with tool to help you better share with your close friends and family. Well now they’re introducing an Apple TV app that helps you and your friends share what’s going on in your life with everyone gathered around the TV.
Storehouse, a company we voted our favorite mobile app at the Crunchies in 2015, is taking a crack at the tired TV slideshow, but in the process seems to have created something so cool that it makes the concept exciting again.
“Users don’t really want their whole iCloud libraries being shown on the TV,” Storehouse CEO Mark Kjawano told me. This can be because of photo duplicates, screenshots and mundane images like photos of receipts that end up destroying the photo slideshow experience.
What Kawano and his team wanted to do was give everyone access to the TV feed and let them showcase their favorite pictures on the screen at a moment’s notice.
To do this, Storehouse created a new app called Photo Remote that gives users a simple way to send photos from their camera roll straight up to the big screen. The app has some cool built-in filters that allow you to add some flair to your photos before you push them out to the slideshow.
Kawano said he’s not quite sure what all of the use cases are for the app because he knows just how creative their users will get. You could use the app as a livestream at a party to capture everyone’s perspective. It could be a tool at meetings to get a handle on what everyone’s been working on. The app also seems like it’d be perfect for multiple family members showing off their differing perspectives from a cool vacation.
While the iOS app includes photos, videos and text to tell stories, the app for tvOS just focuses on the visual multimedia. “We decided that [text] just wasn’t the right thing for the living room,” Kawano said.
Despite their differences, the TV app integrates with Storehouse’s traditional iOS experience in really cool ways. After you and all your friends are done photo-blogging the night away, you can easily save the experience to your Storehouse library and share it with those same friends through the iOS app.
Apple TV apps look like they’re offering developers really interesting opportunities to play with how people view content on such a large screen, Storehouse has a beautiful iOS app and it appears that their TV app is striving to reach the same visual aesthetic while offering users some new utility.