Over the past few years, I’ve covered a number of video discovery apps, most of which use social networks like Twitter and Facebook to find videos that your friends are sharing, or to show which videos are trending and popular. These apps also increasingly are launching on iOS devices first, with the occasional Android implementation popping up after the fact.
The latest app in the video discovery segment — 9×9.tv — bucks both of those trends: It sorts online videos not based on overall popularity or trending or affinity on social networks. And, well, it provides some video discovery love for Android tablet owners, who have long been neglected by anyone doing much in this space.
The app provides curated channels of video that are designed to mimic viewing habits of regular TV viewers. It does this by breaking videos down into various categories and showing just the most appropriate nine channels based on the time of day. It calls that “day parting,” providing morning shows in the morning and late-night clips at late-night and primetime content in primetime. The idea is to make online video viewing kind of more like the way people watch TV.
Along those lines, the app also allows users to connect devices — like for instance, connecting your 7″ tablet to a bigger 10″ inch tablet (silly, I know), or connecting to an Android-powered connected TV device. That will allow you to browse and navigate videos on the device in your hand, and send them to be watched on the bigger screen.
Viewers will get a continuous feed of videos that they can watch, kind of like TV. Those videos will be curated by time of day and personalized based on the channels that users tend to enjoy watching. But since no one’s perfect, and inevitably users will want to watch something else every now and then, they can also through channels and videos by just swiping back and forth with the power of their index fingers, magically powering a shift in what they’re watching.
Anyway, if you’re one of those people with an Android device and can’t figure out what type of video to watch, download it from the Google Play store and try it out.