It can be hard to find good video content on the web, especially when you’re on a mobile phone. vTap wants to make things easier for you.
The service, which launched last fall, aggregates video from across the web – from over 50,000 sites like ESPN, YouTube, The New York Times, and the Associated Press. It then provides fast search capabilities that recommend results even before you’re done typing. You can also use it to browse video by categories when feeling less picky.
All this, however, takes a bit of effort every time you want to watch something entertaining or informative while sitting on the bus. So vTap has come out with a new “feed” feature. It takes a list of topics once and then continuously suggests videos uploaded onto the web that fall into those topics. The idea is that you can discover video tailored to your interests with very minimal effort beyond the initial setup.
Feeds can be accessed either through a desktop browser or a mobile phone. Most mobile users access vTap using Windows Mobile or iPhone (one additional value of vTap is that it automatically transcodes all video into QuickTime for iPhone compatibility).
vTap’s also taking the feed technology one step further by integrating it into social networks and constructing feeds based on the information people provide in their profiles. If you install either the Facebook or MySpace feed application, you’ll be able to access feeds built with not only your profile info but your friends’ as well, regardless of whether they’ve installed the app themselves.
MyWaves also suggests videos for mobile users but it only builds feeds around one topic at a time (you can combine many of them with vTap).