Chill Gets More Social but Ditches Live Rooms Feature

Chill just launched a new version to make watching videos more social and provide an easier way to find the content you want. Even though the live rooms -- the feature that let you watch videos with friends -- is gone, Chill now offers more discovery options and sharing capabilities like comments, reposts and thoughts. 

The new homepage is now a grid of videos shared by friends and the new popular section shows you what's "cool" at the moment in the Chill community. 

"More and more, the things that are important to us -- music, images, interests -- are being networked," Chill Director of Growth Andrew Skotzko tells LAUNCH. "Why hasn't video been? It's the richest medium of expression we have, but for whatever reason the social tools in video are still pretty weak. Sure, the vast majority of video sharing happens on Facebook & Twitter, but neither of those sites are optimized for consuming video—they're pretty noisy platforms."

While Chill's focus is no longer on watching videos with friends, Andrew says they will still continue to experiment with the live rooms. He says that users had reported a lot of burnout associated with a 100% synchronous product experience. 

"The new version actually does have a really addictive realtime experience: if you're on the site, you get a realtime notification when someone else is watching one of your videos so you can chat with them about it," Andrew says.

While the old Chill felt like video version of Turntable.fm, the new version feels more like a Tumblr for video. It's now super simple to repost videos and comment on them. A similar product, ShowYou, is an app for the iPad rather than open web.

Chill's last major update occurred in November when the company integrated Hulu to offer viewers scheduled times to watch full-length television episodes with friends. 


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