Meet Shelby, Your Personalized Channel For Web Video

**Waqas** · October 24, 2011

There are plenty of videos on the Internet. YouTube users alone upload 8 years of video every day. What the web needs is a service that helps organize them.

Shelby.tv hopes to provide that service. The startup is launching a web video player Monday that collects content your friends share on your Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr into one stream.

Instead of watching video on a small square within a large YouTube page, which can be surrounded by less-than-tasteful comments from strangers, you watch it in full-screen mode and within the context of your friends’ recommendations. You can watch the stream consistently — like TV — without searching or clicking, or you can reorder and delete videos. If you like a video, you can save it to a personal favorites feed.

“I don’t watch TV unless a friend says, ‘You have to see this show,’” says cofounder Reece Pacheco. “…We’re trying to bring the same strength as word of mouth to web video.”

The startup, a graduate of TechStars’ inaugural New York class, is also launching an iPhone and iPad app Monday. The app is similar to the browser version, but portable. Pacheco says that he, for instance, sometimes watches Shelby.tv on his iPad while he’s brushing his teeth.

Despite this habit, Pacheco says the goal of Shelby.tv is not to get people to watch more web video, but to to help them more easily find relevant web video. Eventually, the company plans to add “smart video” features, recommendations based on friends’ favorites, e-mail notifications that alert you when someone watches your video and feeds that reorder themselves based on your past behavior. The player already notes and removes duplicate videos.

Shelby.tv isn’t the only startup that has these goals. VHX is a similar social web video platform that, like Shelby.tv, has a bookmark that can be used to add video from all over the web. In addition to scoping out videos in social feeds, it has users follow each other directly on the platform in order to share videos. iPad app Plizy builds you a personalized video stream based on your behavior on Facebook and Twitter.

At this point, the most obvious difference between Shelby.tv and others who are attempting similar hands-free socially curated web video is the experience they’ve each created — a point that goes back to why the team decided to name their product “Shelby” in the first place. The name comes from a sports car called the “Shelby Cobra.”

“It’s fast, powerful, sexy, cool,” Pacheco says. “That’s us.”