Showyou

2012 was a big year for Showyou.

We worked hard throughout the year at making the app better — more useful and more fun.

We launched two big updates for the iPad (Showyou 3 in February and Showyou 4 in December); an from-the-ground up overhaul of our iPhone app (Showyou 3.3 in July) and introduced a web companion to Showyou  in April. And there were ongoing, more incremental improvements launched nearly every month.

It seems like people appreciated the improvements. Showyou was included in Apple’s “Best of 2012” list (second year in a row!), and is one of the “10 Essential” apps in the Social Networking category. And Showyou was in most of the prominent “Top Apps of 2012″ and “Top 10″ lists we saw, including those from ABC News, the Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Venture Beat and Bloomberg News. And the latest version of Showyou is consistently chalking up 5 Star reviews in the AppStore.

We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished, but we know we’re still in the early days of this journey. The combination of smartphones and tablets connected to the Internet will revolutionize how and what we watch. Progress will be lumpy, and TV certainly won’t disappear overnight — but huge changes are coming, and we’re excited to be a part of it. We intend to stay focused on making Showyou an app you can’t live without. We feel like we got a lot closer to that in 2012.

Thanks to everyone who tried out our app for your support and your time, and for helping us to make something special.

Showyou 4.0 is here. It’s simpler, easier-to-use and more fun than ever. Take the tour.

We (mostly) try to avoid boasting and to let our app do the talking.

But occasionally we need to break that rule. Today is such a day.

In case you missed it, the AppStore got a facelift last week. For each of the major categories in the AppStore (News, Music, etc) the AppStore now provides a curated list of “10 Essential Apps.” We were thrilled to see Showyou in “10 Essential Apps” list for Social Networking for the iPad.

Other apps in the “10 Essentials” list included well known services like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Skype, as well as hot startups like Pinterest and SoundCloud.

We were just as excited to see Showyou featured prominently in the Social Networking category on the iPhone AppStore (along with Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and LinkedIn).

It’s incredible group of peers, we’re honored to be listed with them. But there’s much more to come. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Showyou 3.4.4 is now live in the AppStore. Thanks for your patience.

*****

We just released Showyou 3.4.3 yesterday, with various improvements and bug fixes.

We also completely re-worked our sign-on process, to make it easier to sign-in with your email address and to make the process even more secure.

But, in doing that, we inadvertently introduced a couple of new bugs. The really bad bug: People who are still on iOS5 will find they can’t open the app at all. And, some of you may find that after force-quitting the app you may get logged out and have to re-signin with your Twitter or Facebook account.

We have a fix uploaded to Apple, and we hope to have that deployed today, or at latest, tomorrow.

We’re really sorry about this. Thanks for your patience.

Some of you have written in (or tweeted) that the sound on Showyou stopped working when you upgraded to iOS6.

Here’s the culprit — sound doesn’t work if you have the “Mute” switched on. There are two places you might need to check, as outlined in this post at Apple.com, to see if you’ve set the audio to mute on your iPad.

First, check your settings to see if you’re using the side switch for “Mute” or “Lock Rotation.”

If you’re using the side switch for mute, just move that switch back to the “On” position (un-muting your iPad) and Showyou audio should play.

If you’re using the side switch for “Lock Rotation” then double-tap the home button on your iPad, swipe over to the audio controls, and check to make sure mute is “Off.” Once you’ve turned mute “Off” you should be able to hear audio from the app.

We’ll have an update our to Showyou in a week or so which addresses this, and allows audio to play from Showyou even when you have the mute switch on. In the meantime, thanks for your patience.

Want to share videos you find as you’re surfing the web with your friends? Want to add them to your “Watch Later” queue on Showyou?

We’ve always offered a bookmarklet for that. But now we’ve got something even better, a Showyou extension for the Chrome browser. Share videos to Showyou (and Twitter and Facebook, too), add them to your Watch Later queue, and a few other nifty treats (see if you spot them).

Available on the Chrome Web Store now.

As the New York Times and others reported yesterday, we’ve launched a partnership with OMD, a division of Omnicom Group, to test new types of video advertising on Showyou. We’re proud of this partnership, and excited to work with OMD, a forward-thinking agency, and the great consumer brands they represent.

We’ve been thinking about this from the day we started building Showyou (and indeed, even before that). With mobile apps — and in particular with video apps like ours — we felt there was an opportunity to re-make interactive advertising into something more effective, more fun, more useful. Into something better for brands and advertisers and people who use our service. Where, as Umair Haque has written, ads aren’t a “nuisance cost” but instead benefit consumers.

The gold standard for us has always been great print advertising, the kind found in magazines especially. Where beautifully shot, glossy ads tell a story and are an integral, organic, and are part of the overall experience. Where, if you don’t encounter an ad you don’t care for, you simply turn the page.

In the experiment we’re running with OMD, and six of the great brands they represent (Levis, Showtime, Mountain Dew, Monster, and Brooks running shoes) we’ve made video advertising an organic part of the Showyou experience. Each of the brands have grids with their videos — just like the grids for publishers and people who use Showyou.

Videos from the brands are rotated into the main grid on our iPad app, along with videos from people and channels you follow on Showyou, or friends and people you follow on Twitter or Facebook. They behave just like all other videos in the app; you can choose to watch them, share them, comment on them — or not — with a tap. The only thing that’s different is that we note that the video is “promoted.”

Will this be successful? We don’t know. We’ll learn a lot over the coming months.

But, just to be able to test this with OMD and the brands they represent is a huge success. We’re excited to have found a forward-thinking, innovative partners in OMD, Levis, Monster, Mountain Dew, Doritos, and Brooks; with them we look forward to inventing new ways for video advertising to tell stories, and to be fun, useful and relevant in the mobile world.

The new version of Showyou released today (v. 3.4 to be precise) includes a bunch of wonderful treats for those of you using Showyou on the iPad, including retina-display support (w00t!) and the inclusion of ”Send to Friend” and “Thanks” (new social features we added to the iPhone and iPod Touch version of Showyou last month that we’ve now added to the iPad).

But the thing we’re probably most excited about is a subtle, and simple, change we’ve made — enabling you to multi-task when you beam a video to your Apple TV via Airplay with Showyou. What’s that mean? That you can Tweet and Instagram and check your email while you play a video from Showyou on your TV.

Now, before go getting all troll-y on us, we appreciate that Apple has supported multi-tasking with Airplay since iOS5 was introduced late last year. And of course Showyou was designed right from the start to take advantage of Airplay and has supported Airplay broadly, albeit without multi-tasking, since we launched our app in April 2011. Which might lead you to ask, “So why should I care that you’re launching this multi-tasking-thingy-on-Airplay now?”

Well, because these little touches combined with the bigger things add up to something special. Showyou on the iPad has always worked well with the Apple TV and Airplay (indeed, Showyou has been included in many best Airplay apps lists like this one). And the newest version of Showyou on the iPhone and iPod Touch makes it a great Airplay client, too.

With Showyou on your iPad (or iPhone or iPod Touch), tens of millions of great, hand-picked videos are a tap or two away, ready to be beamed to your TV. A video shared by a friend on Facebook, or someone you follow on Showyou. Or a video from a channel like The Daily Show or Funny or Die or The Verge or TED. Or one of the 60+ million videos in our search index.

The simple addition of multi-tasking makes using Showyou with your Apple TV a pure delight. Just tap a video to play it, beam it to your TV with another tap, and multi-task the night away. Check your email, check the weather, or play Fruit Ninja while you watch.

It might just be the best remote control you ever had.

This Sunday night, the Mars Rover named “Curiosity” will land on Mars around 10:31 PDT. This is going to be an epic event, more important and arguably more interesting than the Olympics:

Next week … a nuclear-powered, MINI-Cooper-sized super rover will land on Mars. We accurately guided this monster from 200 million miles away (that’s 7.6 million marathons). It requires better accuracy than an Olympic golfer teeing off in London and hitting a hole-in-one in Auckland, New Zealand. It will use a laser to blast rocks, a chemical nose to sniff out the potential for life, and hundreds of other feats of near-magic. Will these discoveries lead us down a path to confirming life on other planets?

You can keep track of all the coverage on Showyou with the Mars Curiosity grid on your iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad or on the web.