Name: VHX
Quick Pitch: VHX.tv helps discover, share and watch video from around the web in one spot.
Genius Idea: Creating a hands-free viewing experience that automatically plays one video after the next.
VHX co-founders Jamie Wilkinson and Casey Pugh are no strangers to web video. Wilkinson, also the co-founder of Know Your Meme, was the primary developer for online video aggregator Magma. Pugh spent time as a developer at Vimeo. And together they and a team created a crowdsourced movie, Star Wars Uncut, that won an Emmy for outstanding achievement in interactive media last year.
In November, the co-founders decided to com bine what they had learned by working in web video to design their ideal web watching product. The result, which launched in private beta yesterday, is something like a combination of Twitter, Instapaper, and Last.fm for video.
Like Instapaper, the VHX.tv site offers a bookmarklet that easily collects content from around the web in one queue for later viewing. This is how video from different platforms — YouTube and Vimeo for now, but more to come — gets dumped into VHX.tv.
Originally Wilkinson and Pugh started on a product that focused on this concept.
“About a week in, I realized that my queue was a very lonely place and I wanted to look at Casey’s view,” Wilkinson says.
Hence, the team created the Twitter aspect of VHX.tv. Like the microblog, users can follow other users on VHX.tv in order to see the videos they add to the system (when you log in the first time, you automatically follow a default staff account). Like T witter, users can add...