Shelby.tv, the video-sharing startup (and stars of Bloomberg’s TechStars reality show), is today exiting out of its private alpha phase and launching into a public beta. The service, founded by Reece Pacheco, Dan Spinosa, Henry Sztul and Joe Yevoli, aggregates the video links your friends are sharing across social networks in order to offer you personalized video recommendations.
It’s now available in the iTunes app store as a native app for the iPhone or iPad.
The new service automatically pulls all the videos your friends share on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr into a curated video channel with videos you can watch, favorite and then re-share. There’s also a browser bookmarklet that lets you save any video on the web into Shelby.tv for later viewing. The product is dead-simple to use, and enters into the popular (if somewhat crowded) personalized video space.
According to a company blog post, the newly launched iOS app has been improved based on user feedback and is now offering improved speed and performance. One notable addition is the new de-duplication feature which smartly removes duplicate copies of videos which have been shared by multiple friends.
There are also different ways to filter videos in the app’s guide – by your favorites (the “like view”), by your saved videos (“watch later” view) and by the “timeline view” which shows you all the videos your friends are sharing. At any time, you can pull down on the video guide to refresh your recommendations.
Shelby.tv has $1.73 million in total funding, having most recently received a $1.5 million round this summer, from Avalon Ventures and a number of angels.
You can learn more about the iOS’s app’s features in the video below, or just download it here on iTunes.
