When Showyou first launched last April, we noted that it was sort of like a Flipboard for video content. A new update out today kicks it up a notch by making things more visually appealing while adding more content and making it easier to find.

Version 2.0 of Showyou features a redesigned iPad UI that is really fantastic looking. The grid-like look existed before, but now it’s smoother and easier to manipulate. It feels like the way video browsing should be done on a tablet. Most recent videos are in the upper left and you move over and down to move through time.

The grid concept remains key. And the new version expands upon it adding content from new, large publishers such as The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, TED, BBC, and others. Each of these publishers now has their own grid that you can subscribe to with one click. And you can hop between grids to focus on specific content.

You can also now search for videos on Showyou. And things you search for can be saved and made into their own grids. Search is also nice because it’s socially-infused. Showyou isn’t scanning all of YouTube, it’s just returning results upon what people are sharing on the big social networks. There are some 12 million videos available to search right now, Showyou says.

But my favorite aspect of the app has to be the integration with AirPlay, Apple’s over-the-air streaming video technology. If you have an Apple TV hooked up to you TV, you can browse for videos on Showyou and quickly push them to be watched on your big screen. It really turns your iPad into a big visual, social remote. It’s something Showyou had in mind when they started work on the app, CEO Mark Hall says.

“This is an incredibly addictive environment to watch videos,” Hall says, noting that the reverse chronological way is not ideal for a tablet. “It’s a tragedy to present it this way,” he says.

You can find Showyou 2.0 in the App Store here.

Once you sign into the app with your Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts, Showyou will displau videos from your friends on Facebook, people you follow on Twitter and Tumblr, and from channels you subscribe to on YouTube and Vodpod on one screen, called the Showyou Grid. Videos are presented in a grid-like format, allowing you to easily view all of the content that is shared by your friends.

You can also follow people on Showyou, comment on videos, and share videos to your social networks and within the app. The feed itself will only contain Tweets, Facebook updates and other messages that include videos. To start, Showyou will include and allow viewing of videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and TED (you also won’t be able to access licensed content like TV shows from the app). In the coming weeks and months, the startup says that users will be able to share and view videos from many publishers so long as they’re HTML5 and iOS compatible.

Mark Hall, CEO of Remixnation (the company behind Vodpod and Showyou), tells us that the app is trying to add a social layer to video viewing. YouTube and other video sites lack this element and it can be difficult to filter your Facebook and Twitter streams to focus purely on viewing video. Hall also believes that users want to access this content on a mobile device, like an iPad, and does not plan on extending the application to the web. As for making money, Showyou plans to display cost-per-view, click-to-play ads within the app and may experiment with a subscription service.

Hall adds that the company used much of Vodpod’s core, underlying technology to build Showyou. Launched in late 2006, Vodpod has over 1 million registered users who have collected videos from over 20,000 different video sites.

ShowYou’s interface is sleek, especially on an iPad, but I’m curious if consumers will want a dedicated app for social video. I like apps like Flipboard because it aggregates content from all of my news feeds and social networks in one place.

We’ll be using the service to power our new TechCrunch Video site, which you can find at http://video.techcrunch.com or in the masthead above. The new site will feature a collection of recent video content from throughout the TechCrunch network, and we’re also opening it up to user submitted videos — if you have an interesting interview, demo, or other tech related video that you’d like to share with the TechCrunch community, here’s your chance.

We last covered VodPod back in 2006, when the site launched as a YouTube competitor with some social bookmarking features. Since then the site has seen some major changes: CEO Mark Hall says that within a month or two after launching, VodPod decided to disable user-uploaded videos and to concentrate on its bookmarking functionality, which was quickly becoming the site’s most popular feature. The startup launched a widget that allows bloggers to include their most recently bookmarked videos into their sites, which Hall says is currently being used by over 40,000 bloggers.

In 2007, VodPod launched an API that allowed sites to manage their video content, drawing from videos that they’d either bookmarked on VodPod or uploaded themselves. The API has been used by Second Life, NewTeeVee and a number of other well known sites. But up until earlier this year, using the API required developer resources, which prevented many sites that would have otherwise benefited from having their own video portals from using it.

Around nine months ago VodPod launched an experimental version of VodSpot as a hosted solution that allowed publishers to build video portals with a minimal amount of work required (Hall compares this to WordPress.com’s hosted blogs versus WordPress.org). But at the time the customization options were limited, with only a handful of designs available. Today’s launch includes support for VodPod’s new template engine Laminate, which will allow publishers to fully customize the appearance of their sites.

Hall says that the company will monetize VodSpot by offering some premium features like custom domain mapping and control over advertising, which will cost $10 a month. He says that sites that draw lots of traffic will likely fall under a different pricing structure, given that VodSpot will be hosting the content. He also notes that VodPod is driving some impressive traffic now — it has quintupled since a year ago and now sees over 10 million monthly uniques — so the revenue coming in from advertising is significant.

In conjunction with today’s launch, VodSpot is also open-sourcing the Laminate template engine, and is launching a new version of its API that adds support for finding the most popular videos in a given subject (say, politics) across the thousands of video sites that VodSpot indexes.

VodPod is heavily designed around social networking. Have a thing for birds? Join the bird “pod” and you’ll have an instantaneous collection of birding videos. Like unicycling? Some kids from Australia have started a pod around that pastime too. Users can join multiple groups that cluster videos around various subjects that allows them to post and collect new videos that pertain to that topic. Although you don’t have to join a pod or even sign up with VodPod to search pod videos. Users can “lurk” within the pods anonymously without being socially networked.

Videos added to a pod don’t have to be original VodPod material. They can come from other sharing sites like YouTube using the embed code.

“Basically it allows you to build a video collection from videos you find on MySpace or YouTube or over 100 of these sites on the Internet, or you can put video of your own up on VodPod as the host, and then build a mixture of them.” said Mark Hall, one of the three founders of VodPod, in a phone briefing last Friday.

Hall and his partners are big fans of Last.fm and wanted to create a similar experience where users can build networks of friends with similar tastes and watch what they watch. Although, users can’t necessarily watch everything their friends watch because it is possible to mark certain videos as private, making it impossible for others to know that you have watched them.

VodPod development began over the summer in San Francisco where the company has been privately funded. Philip Rosedale, founder and CEO of Linden Labs and Second Life, and Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic, which owns WordPress, are both outside advisers to the company.