Featured Startup Pitch: TVibes - A video app for life's everyday moments

TVibes screen6

COMPANY: TVibes

ELEVATOR PITCH

Up until now, mobile video has been all about the 10 percent: People are constantly limited by either the file size, the audience (public, private), the packaging (six seconds long?), or the prettiness (filters, editing tools?). There wasn’t a tool for the 90 percent of life–for the everyday video which makes up the bulk of mobile video people are taking. TVibes is the go-to app for the everyday moments in life, allowing you to share your everyday video, your way.

PRODUCT/SERVICE DESCRIPTION

Smartphone cameras have improved—people are taking more ‘everyday’ mobile video than ever. Despite this, this video content doesn’t always get to the people who would find it interesting or relevant. The industry lacks a simple tool to allow ‘non-sharers’–hesitant to share their video moments with their entire online community–a way to easily share video content with specific groups of people. TVibes was designed to address this huge gap in the market, giving people who are recording a lot of everyday video an easy way to share that video with the people it matters to.

It’s not for that slick six second piece of video art or for a live stream to strangers, but for the four minute high-quality clip of your daughter’s first piano recital shared with the extended family, the 50 second crazy altercation on the bus you want to share with colleagues, or that amazing set at the latest Coldplay concert you went to that anyone who loves Coldplay will appreciate.

TVibes provides one simple platform that allows users to share video across an entire spectrum of privacy settings. You don’t have to choose different apps for different audiences; with TVibes you have one, personal broadcast channel in the cloud. When you record video it automatically appears on their channel, but depending on the privacy setting users have chosen, people following that channel will see different content.

Smartphone memory space is also at a premium—as people are recording more and more video, they are finding it harder and harder to store it all on their phones. As a result, videos are either getting deleted or stored externally and then forgotten about. Because it’s cloud-based, TVibes can offer instant and unlimited storage. More importantly, your TVibes channel will make automatic video albums of all the video moments you’ve recorded, since videos are sorted by chronology, hashtag, or location. No video will be forgotten on an external hard drive ever again.

Finally, TVibes is also optimizing video discovery because like TV, TVibes works on a channel basis. It’s easy for users to scroll through curated, crowdsourced video content on any topic or location they might be interested in, and then follow channels with content they love. They can search by hashtag or location to see content that has been designated ‘public’ by other users, and videos uploaded become instantly available on peoples’ channels—so that anyone following can immediately enjoy new content. The videos are also ‘near live,’ meaning users don’t have to tune in at exactly the right moment to catch footage from the latest concert or soccer match, they can check into the relevant hashtag whenever they want to get 360 degree views of any event.

DIFFERENTIATORS VS. THE COMPETITION

TVibes differs from the competition in a few key ways. Firstly, it’s not a video sharing app, but a ‘channel sharing’ app. What this means is that the various dynamic privacy settings of all your videos are always maintained, as opposed to other apps—like WhatsApp—where you can share a video with a specific person, but there is nothing stopping them from sharing it with someone else who you may not want watching it. With TVibes, all your video content is hosted on your channel, and you decide what level of privacy different groups or viewers will have.

Another critical difference is that TVibes combines multiple different privacy settings into one place. People tend to record a wide array of moments/experiences, each with different target audiences, but then they have to choose different apps or platforms for these different types of videos. One app for private moments (i.e. family album apps, or storage apps) and a different app for public moments (i.e. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube). TVibes is unique in allowing for extremely flexible and intuitive control of how your followers see your broadcasts – but all managed through one single platform. You only have to deal with one interface, but it allows you to seamlessly set multiple different privacy definitions – from private moments, to stuff you want to share with just family members, or just with friends, or with a wider audience.

Finally, from a design and UX perspective, TVibes takes a completely different approach to mobile video. Unlike most apps out there, instead of treating video like computer files, which have to be opened one after another in order to be viewed and enjoyed, TVibes (as the name suggests) takes a note from TV, to make viewing videos fun and intuitive. Users can watch a continuous stream of videos that are all from a single event, specific location, hashtag, or person, and since videos are organized according to those categories, watching videos on TVibes is like watching a story unfold.

FOUNDERS’ STORY

Uri Schneider and Gilad Carni founded TVibes together in 2014. Previously, the two had co-founded and sold ChatVibes, the first video-chat for Facebook Chat and one of the most popular add-ons on the Internet at the time. Uri also represented a number of prominent U.S.-based hedge funds, and was business development director for Emblaze PLC—an early mobile video pioneer. He is also the founder of the Obelisk Group, which provides outsourced international business development services. TVibes co-founder Gilad Carni is a prominent player in the Israel hi-tech scene. Before TVibes, he founded and sold two companies: GC Marketing Services, an online promotional staffing agency based in New York City, and ChatVibes. Carni was also the first investor in LabPixies, the first Israeli company sold to Google, and regularly appears in the media as an industry expert on the Israeli tech ecosystem.