This article was published on February 7, 2013

Telly hits 7m users and launches My Telly, a new video discovery tool leveraging your social graph


Telly hits 7m users and launches My Telly, a new video discovery tool leveraging your social graph

Video discovery and sharing service Telly has launched a new feature today, called My Telly, that helps users discover new clips to watch based on the engagement from their social graph.

Available from the homescreen, My Telly uses a much sleeker, film reel-like interface similar to cover flow on iTunes, which Telly says has been designed to be a more casual experience for watching, sharing and skipping videos.

The service, which connects to both the user’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, now interprets how their friends are engaging with videos on the web. This could be when they upload a video, leave a comment on Facebook, send a tweet about it, or simply view it on YouTube.

Telly then analyzes all of this data and filters it depending not only on what the user has watched before, but also what device they’re using at the time. So if the user is browsing from an iPhone, Telly says it will suggest shorter video clips before any long-form or feature-length ones.

tellyscreenshot2

In our tests the new feature worked without a hitch. Videos start automatically, with a profile image underneath the player to show who shared it originally. Two large buttons at the bottom are used to flick forwards and backwards through the reel, and a “Like” button at the bottom allows you to share it again with your friends.

To coincide with the launch of My Telly, the company has revealed today that its userbase has doubled over the past seven months since it rebranded from TwitVid, hitting 7 million unique users in total.

The number of videos indexed by the service has also grown rapidly, increasing from 7 million to 75 million since it dropped the TwitVid name. The company says that its users now spend 20 minutes on the site during each visit, watching at least four videos before leaving.

Twitvid.com first launched in 2009 as a clip sharing site, but shifted its focus in December 2011 to become a social video network. Users could then not only share video that they had shot on their devices, but also link to other services such as YouTube and Vimeo.

That idea is still prevalent in Telly, although its library of content has since been boosted by recognizable brands such as CNN and ESPN. It’s available as an app for both iOS and Android, although when we checked, the My Telly feature was only available from the browser.

➤ Telly | iOS | Android

Disclosure: This article contains an affiliate link. While we only ever write about products we think deserve to be on the pages of our site, The Next Web may earn a small commission if you click through and buy the product in question. For more information, please see our Terms of Service.

Image Credit: Adam Berry/Getty Images

Get the TNW newsletter

Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.