All posts in “social tv”

Stevie For Your TV

Michelle McCudden is a Manager on the Client Strategy & Innovation team at Social Media Group. Follow @mmccudden1

I’m not an indiscriminate social networker. I keep a fairly tight circle on Facebook and try to keep my Twitter follows around the 200 mark. I’ve experiemented with bigger circles, but find that I start to tune out when they get too big. Thanks to this careful pruning, I know that most of the content my network shares is going to be of at least some interest to me. And when it comes to video content, I end up starring a lot of tweets to find the video later, or bookmarking links from Facebook into a folder called “Stuff I Want to Watch.”

The new startup, Stevie, from Gil Rimon aims to address that. Stevie is a web-based platform that takes the content from our social networks and creates what it calls “TV shows” out of it, with names like The Comedy Strip, Music Non-Stop, and Top Stories that sort the video and audio content into themed streams. The content plays as part of themed TV show, with relevant tweets and Facebook updates scrolling in the bottom and side margins.

Essentially, Stevie provides a similar functionality as Flipboard—in the same way that Flipboard takes your content and makes a more attractive looking magazine-type display, Stevie makes an (arguably) more attractive and easy to use video display, complete with iPhone and Android apps that act as remotes, so you can easily watch Stevie on your TV, rather than your laptop. The app and the service are free, so there are ads to support the service, similar to the overlay ads that you might see on YouTube.

It looks like they’re still working out a few of the kinks—in the time I’ve been experimenting I’ve seen a few videos repeat themselves, and I seem to get a lot of “celeb” updates from celebs I don’t follow—but the idea has promise. What do you think? Would you use Stevie as your new tool for content consumption?