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| Time to shuffle your video browsing |
| Aabhas Sharma / New Delhi Jul 12, 2010, 00:47 IST |
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It’s time to move over YouTube, Metacafe and other online video-browsing portals; now, its Shufflr. If the thought of videos means YouTube to you, Bangalore-based Althea Systems’s video-browsing website, www.shufflr.tv, aims to change the pattern of video-viewing for you.
How does the technology work?
Shufflr is a social video browser that blends learning algorithms and social graphs to steer videos towards you from all over the web. In simple words, it is a one-stop shop where you don’t search for videos, videos find you. It’s a smart aggregator of aggregators.
Shufflr sifts through millions of online videos and picks only those that are relevant to the viewer, on the basis of his profile and viewing history. For instance, if you search keywords like “Manchester United Goals” what you get is only the related videos available across various video sharing websites on the internet.
Once you start using the browser regularly, it adapts to your viewing patterns and improves its recommendations to your search queries. There’s even a social video feed available. This allows you to see what your online friends have been watching.
There’s a trending video feed that allows you to see which videos are currently popular on the web. These functions are more or less available on YouTube as well, but it depends on content uploaded by users on its server.
Does it work?
To start using Shufflr, users need to download the application and register on the website. The download takes less than five minutes on a broadband connection. Once registered, users can start browsing videos from their PC. Overall, we found this to be a relatively hassle-free procedure.
When we tried Shufflr, it worked smoothly. There was a vast choice of videos to pick from and the quality of videos was also good. What works in favour of Shufflr is that you know you won’t have to try other sites if the search result doesn’t yield what you want. There are about 140 channels categorised as sports and entertainment, among others. Vinod Gopinath, CEO, Althea Systems, says the company is in the process of getting additional content feeds.
If you are wondering why you haven’t heard of Shufflr yet, that is because the company has been low on promotions and the browser went live just last month.
Do we recommend?
We know old habits die hard, but it wouldn’t harm to give Shufflr a try as it is indeed a one-stop shop for online videos available on the web. The homepage of Shufflr may not seem very attractive but the browser definitely is.
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