White label “viewing Party” provider SocialVision launched YouTubeSocial, a product that combines Facebook’s Social Graph with IM-like chat to create a live video experience in which viewers can watch and comment on YouTube videos simultaneously in real time.
To use YouTubeSocial, just type in the word “social” in the URL before the .com and you’ll be automatically redirected to the YouTubeSocial platform. You can invite your friends using the URL, or use the Facebook Connect integration that allows you to select friends from your dock, which then sends out chat messages with an invitation to watch.
Traditional methods of discovering and sharing videos—through email, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube itself—have their limitations, which govern the speed at which viewership grows. Even when videos go viral, online video watching is still a solitary act. This results in an organic sharing pace that is too slow and keeps a video from becoming an event. There is no water cooler effect—we’ve all received video links from mom that are years old.
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YouTubeSocial may catalyze this sharing process, making video watching a micro-event that has the potential to build into Super Bowl simultaneity, especially with live events. This may provide an answer to the DVR and VOD problem keeping networks and advertisers up at night—by creating captive audiences that cannot fast-forward through commercials in the midst of a live social experience.
