To help differentiate itself from other Android handset makers, Samsung introduced its Milk music streaming service back in March. Now the electronics giant is expanding its Milk brand with a foray into curated video.
The new Milk Video app presents a stream of curated videos from big names like Vice, Venmo, Vevo, Funny or Die and Red Bull. Users can follow their friends and brands. Videos are sorted into categories that include Comedy, Entertainment, Gaming, How-To, Music, News, Random, Sports and Tech.
The main UI is simple enough: scroll down a list of video screens and tap the video you want to see, to surface the video categories you tap and hold on the rainbow-colored band along the right-hand side of the screen. As you slide up and down there’s a nice piece of haptic feedback vibration as the categories scroll by.
While signing up isn’t necessary to use the app, creating an account lets you swipe away videos you don’t want in your feed, and the system learns your video preferences; you can also share those videos to Facebook and Twitter.
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You can’t add videos you find on the Internet to Milk Video, but the app will be getting exclusive videos from Vice and Red Bull, and is in talks with Funny or Die for exclusive content.
I used the pre-release version of the app for an evening. It’s a fun way to check out bite-sized videos on a large smartphone display. In fact, it’s built especially for those large Samung displays on the company’s recent devices, according to Vice President of content and services Kevin Swint.
Of course, like Milk, this is a Samsung-only app. If you have a supported Samsung device (Galaxy Note II, Galaxy Note 3, Galaxy Note 4, Galaxy Note Edge, Galaxy Mega, Galaxy S III, Galaxy S 4, Galaxy S 4 mini, Galaxy S III mini and Galaxy S 5) you can download the app from the Google Play store.
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