We’ve followed Shelby.tv since the team first stepped into the scene on the TechStars NY’s reality TV show. Since then, we watched the company build a gorgeous social video experience and attended its first hackathon. The battle for the future of social video continues to rage on, but Shelby.tv is still at the top of our list.
Shelby.tv began with the simplest possible point of attack: pulling YouTube videos from your Twitter feed into one place. The company then grew its social sources by integrating sites like Facebook and Tumblr, and added more video players such as Vimeo, Hulu, and College Humor. Soon it had a massive data set to play with, while spreading across the iPhone, iPad and Apple TV.
Today, on the stage at TNW 2012, cofounder Reece Pacheco is announcing the next generation of Shelby. It is now available in private beta, codenamed “Shelby GT.”
At the core of GT is what the team calls “Rolls,” a tool for users to organize and share video with friends. A Roll is a living, dynamic group of videos that can be automatically created by a feed (tweets, posts, etc.) or personally curated by one or more individuals. Shelby seems to want to bring curation to video — something that when done right, has quite a lot of potential.
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From Pacheco:
We’re giving our users the opportunity to curate their own experience in the simplest way possible and while Shelby is still very much a lean-back product, Rolls allow for a richer conversation and social context to be built around each video, while also bettering discovery and filtering.
When we started Shelby, we set out with the goal to fix the discovery of and build community around video. We’re proud that our core thesis is now more important than ever in the greater internet, and Shelby “GT” is the result of our focus on these important themes.
The Shelby Video Graph – our big data backend – enables us to now build valuable user tools into Shelby and “Rolls” are just the first example of this.
If you’re itching to get into Shelby GT early, head over to gt.shelby.tv and sign up for a private invite. While you wait, check out the current version of Shelby.tv here!
Follow all our coverage of The Next Web Conference 2012 here.
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