This article was published on October 13, 2011

Skyfire for iOS now recommends videos like Pandora does music


Skyfire for iOS now recommends videos like Pandora does music

Not content to simply play Flash-based Web videos on iOS, the newly released Skyfire 4.0 for iPad and iPhone brings you recommendations for other videos you’d be interested in watching based on the page you are currently browsing.

Skyfire announced that it had cumulatively crossed over ten million downloads on the Android and iOS platforms in over 150 countries and was launching a major new version of its mobile Web browser today. The new version of the app will offer “Pandora-like video recommendations” from across the Web, based on the content of your current webpage.

A new Related button on the bottom-left corner of the app now displays all the videos embedded on the current page, followed by its list of recommendations from elsewhere on the Internet. The recommended videos can, of course, be Flash-based and the browser will play them without a hitch.

It uses a community-powered ranking engine that keeps track of the most popular videos on the Internet in various categories on any given day. The recommendations are then generated based on the webpage you are currently on, even if there are no embedded videos on it.

Skyfire was launched late last year and is by far the most widely used Flash-playing Web browser on the iOS platform. It achieves this feat by performing a server-side transcoding of Flash videos to an iOS-compatible format and streaming it to your device. The app added social networking integration with Facebook and Twitter in March this year and recently improved the user experience further by adding auto-discovery of Flash videos on any webpages you visit.

[Skyfire is available for the iPhone at $2.99 and the iPad at $4.99 on the App Store. It is compatible with all iOS devices running iOS 3.0 or later.]

[Header image courtesy of Sergey_R / Shutterstock.com.]

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