Sneak Peek: Poptiq

by Eric March on September 3, 2008 at 10:42 pm

Yeah, we don’t have Flash. We can’t play Flash games. Not much we can do about that. However, watching videos online may have just gotten a whole lot easier thanks to developer Metranome with the pending release of their personalized video aggregator, Poptiq.

In its own way, Poptiq does for online videos something like what Pandora does for music by letting you get granular with your personal viewing preferences. Upon first loading Poptiq you’re given a brief getting started video that gets you familiarized with the basics. A second tutorial is included that covers more extended usage and sharing. Once you’re finished watching the initial tutorial, you’ll be dumped into the Carousel, which is your main video viewing menu. It’s a bit like coverflow, and lets you spin the carousel to get to different videos or tutorials.

Once you’ve covered the basics, you can create a free personal Poptiq account (so it can remember your viewing preferences and serve up appropriate videos over the air), then get started training the app on the sort of videos you prefer to watch. It comes with a small handful of pre-loaded videos that cover a range of topics — comedy, science & nature, sports, animals & nature, cars & transportation, fashion & beauty, movies & TV, and music. Watch each one and then tell it whether you’d like to see more or less of the given topic. In this manner, Poptiq will become familiar with the sort of videos you like to watch and will serve up more or less of the same.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. The longer you leave Poptiq open, the more videos it will download over the network and store locally based on your preferences so you can view them without any network lag. If you watch a video and like it, you can tap on the “save” button on the end-of-video menu and save it to your saved carousel. These videos will remain stored locally on your device and you can watch them any time without requiring any connection to the network. If you want details on a particular video, you can tap on the corner flap on the top right of the image on the carousel.

The more videos you view and rate per your preferences, the more it will download, as indicated by a green arrow on the bottom left, while at the same time cycling viewed videos out to make room for new ones. (Your carousel only has a certain amount of space available, but saved videos stay saved.) You can even share your videos over Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Just add whichever one(s) you belong to into your profile, and any time you want to share, just tap the social networking site you want to share to and it’ll upload it.

By this point, some of you may think, “Hey, this isn’t YouTube!” You’re right. It isn’t, nor is it intended to be. This isn’t an app for someone who wants to go searching for specific videos, that’s not how this works. Just like Pandora, you listen to what’s in your playlist (or in this case, watch what’s in your carousel — and don’t worry, you don’t have to be 30, but you may feel reborn, and most of you won’t even get this reference), skip ones you don’t like, and give thumbs up (slide the “want more” slider) to ones you do. The difference here is that you don’t have to move sequentially — pick whatever is in your carousel and watch. The more you watch, the more videos are rotated in — plus, you get to save stuff you like to watch anywhere, any time.

If I had to nitpick — and y’all know how much I love to nitpick — it’s that the rotation of the carousel is rather choppy, and I know the PowerVR can render this far smoother than it seems to be doing, so there seems to be a lack of optimisation or good use of the PowerVR’s capabilities (assuming this isn’t just software rendering in the first place). I’m told they’re working on smoothing this out, however.  But don’t mistake me. Cosmetic performance issues aside, this is quite an impressive app. It presents itself with a slick interface, some nice options, and offers a unique concept in exploring and personalizing online videos from a boatload of sources you can’t access through Safari.

Metranome expect to debut this on the app store tomorrow — assuming it doesn’t get hung up in Apple’s vetting process — and from all indications I’ve been able to find, it will be a freebie. But owing both to the fact that Metranome were cool enough to pass me over a preview copy, and because there’s just far too much to this app to cover in one paragraph, I’m giving it its own review instead of trying to stuff it into my Free App Store Review.

Check out some screenies below while you wait for it to show up in your favourite software house.

UPDATE: It’s now in the App Store. Grab it here.

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Posted in App Store, Application Related