Digg is giving its users a more streamlined, lean-back experience for watching video. The news aggregator launched the Digg TV feature on February 25, 2015.
About a year ago, Digg introduced the Video section on its site. This part of Digg contains curated video clips from around the Internet (much like The Chive’s recent video offering The Bomb). However, Digg users had to click to select their next video, and did not have the ability to organize the video clips in any particular fashion.
That’s where Digg TV comes in. The new feature, which is still in beta, can be found underneath Digg Video clips next to the social sharing buttons. When a Digg user clicks it, the video in question expands to full screen in the TV player. New videos will continue to auto-play from the category the initial video was part of; users can click “explore” to change to another category, including “Cute,” “Explainer,” “Trailers,” “Gaming,” and more.
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Digg users can also save videos to their own personalized collection. This is similar to the way YouTube users can compile their own playlists. Digg, however, emphasizes in a blog post how its site editors have already sorted through all the “crap out there” and provided a smoother discovery experience overall: “Can someone please curate the good stuff? Thanks for asking, Internet. We can. We did.”
Long-time internet users may remember Digg from back in the early 2000s, when it was still a widely-used social news website (like its competitor Reddit, which has also delved into online video recently). But Digg’s popularity slowly decreased and it was sold in 2012. With Digg Video and Digg TV, the aggregate site is betting on digital video to help it stay relevant in the coming years.
Digg’s blog post even cites a study from Nielsen, which found millennials watched 33% more online video in 2014 than in 2013. “We want to help accelerate that trend by making it much easier to find, and more fun to watch, the videos Digg curates,” the site writes.
You can experiment with Digg TV for yourself over at Digg Video.
