HN Explorer

Review Our Mashup: CrowdTube.tv

4 points by coryshaw ↗ HN
I'd love to get some feedback on a recently launched mashup idea. http://crowdtube.tv finds trending youtube videos and plays them like a never-ending TV show.

Built on Django, we use cookies to keep track of what you've watched(may move toward HTML5 local DB...but trying to avoid register/login), and we use jquery/ajax to make it feel like a TV station.

A little background:

I'm always annoyed when I try to watch short YouTube videos on Digg/Reddit/Etc... while I'm eating or just chilling on the couch, and pretty much hate Cable TV with a passion, so we built this out of necessity to fill the void.

While I'm not an active contributor here, I know the community is great at giving open, honest, and constructive feedback on ideas...so I'd really appreciate to hear what you think.

Thanks! Cory

5 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 23.5 ms ] thread
philwhln
Hi Cory. Could you make it so that next button doesn't disappear? I tend to hover over next buttons so that I can click next, click next, click next, but it had faded away when I wanted to click it. Also, you might want to be careful of what videos you show, or have categories / ratings. One of first that came up was a man being mauled by a lion with a screaming crowd. It was quite shocking. I think the idea is good (the site, not being mauled by a lion). It's something that I think is lacking from YouTube, although it is now possible with music videos.
coryshaw
Thanks for your feedback. It may not have been obvious in the intro screen, but we've enabled keyboard controls so that you can use your left/right arrows to skip back/forward, up/down arrows to control the volume, spacebar to play/pause, etc.

Knowing that, would you still want the arrows there?

philwhln
Cool, keyboard shortcuts are great, but easy to forget, so visual controller are always good.
coryshaw
Additionally, we're still fine-tuning the algorithm that determines when to show what videos, but in general we want it to reflect what the masses think are the best...brutality and all.
philwhln
Maybe that can be your tagline...

"Streaming what the masses think are the best...brutality and all"