Showyou and the disruption of TV

Lately, it seems like I can’t pick up my iPad without seeing some mention of Showyou—and not just because it’s a joy to watch videos on their awesome interface. Accolades for Showyou are popping up everywhere—the app was just nominated for a Webby as Best Social App, Mobile/Tablet; was added to the “Staff Favorites” section of iTunes for both the iPhone and iPad; and, just days ago, was named one of the “Best iOS Apps to Watch on Apple TV” by Brad Spirrison for TechCrunch—just to name a few.

We’ve known Showyou’s CEO, Mark Hall, since we invested in Remixation, the company behind Showyou, back in June 2007. We have proudly watched Mark and his team continuously innovate over the last several years—building Vodpod and selling it to Lockerz in the fall of 2011, and adding brilliant features to Showyou 3.0, which launched in February of this year. With an app that is consistently named to “Best” lists, including “Best Social Networking App” by iTunes, Mark and his team have clearly hit on something special.

The disruption of television is a much buzzed-about topic right now, with seamless iPad access to entertainment apps like Hulu, Netflix and HBO Go, and rumors of a fancy new AppleTV on the horizon. But while most of this discussion is focused on how new devices and platforms (AppleTV, Google TV, the iPad, etc.) will give us access to the existing world of programming, Showyou is (pardon the pun) showing us the power of new programming created specifically for consumption on these devices. With 62 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute and publishers like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and TED creating their own channels, online video is beginning to eclipse TV (Read Write Web featured a great post about this in January).

Even more telling of this coming revolution is how people are using Showyou. Every time a user opens up the app, he or she is spending an average of 35-40 minutes per video-watching session. The most viewing occurs between 8:00-11:00 p.m.—primetime for television. Afternoons on Saturdays and Sundays, typically reserved for sports and cooking shows, are also popular Showyou viewing times.

This data demonstrates that Showyou has the potential to significantly disrupt what we watch and how we watch it. We spend more time watching television than consuming any other form of media, and yet over the past 50 years, television has remained a relatively narrow platform, with the least range of choice. The advent of the Internet changed everything, and users now want to choose their entertainment from the tens of millions of hours of programming available on sites like YouTube and Vimeo, chosen by our friends or people we follow on social networks, who have tastes or interests similar to ours.

As Showyou collects more and more accolades and gets more and more fun to use (videos recommended for me using over a billion pieces of social signal data? Yes please.), I am quite sure we will continue to see this conversation evolve. A great place to follow it is Mark Hall’s blog, MHallville. In the meantime, sit back, pick up your light-as-air iPad, and enjoy some videos that your friends think you will like.