Very well designed site for video discovery. Findie reminds me a bit of Pluto.TV which is a great site for old-school channel surfing online.
I don't watch very much TV and when I want to veg out for 30 mins, I don't want to go hunting for a good show to watch (if I'm already caught up on the few regular shows I watch).
I'm curious what the makers, @paulrobertcary and @raduamarie, think of Apple's tvOS announcement yesterday and what their plans are to support the Apple TV.
Thanks @rrhoover for the hunt! Findie was built to do exactly as you write: help you find something awesome when you have limited time to watch.
We’re seeing users binge watch up to 4 hours a night and others jump in for 3 minutes over corn flakes. The biggest request we have is for offline viewing in an app for the commuter/airplane use case.
tvOS is exciting and we’re curious to see how Netflix responds. Apple is playing catch-up in two big markets simultaneously with Apple Music and tvOS, and anything that brings more content to consumers globally is also a good thing for creators.
Because we already have so much great content in the 2 to 10 minute range, and requests for offline viewing, our next step is an iOS app, which we are building in React Native (our site is fully React.js based - so no Swift for now) and we will be investing resources in Facebook video hosting, where mobile video advertising is set to explode.
We’re excited to be on here and would love to hear what people think about our content, UX and discovery options.
Thanks to everyone for checking it out.
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@paulrobertcary It is all HD, right? The thing that I like is that there really is something for everyone.
I am interested in hearing a bit more about your plans for the Facebook video and advertising and how these film makers fit in that plan? Looking forward to it because there are a lot of people jumping into video, but not doing it well.
Hey @vbarnett323! Great question. Over 90% of our 1,300+ videos are in HD or FullHD, and we add 30 per week. Some older productions, for example the first ever films by Martin Scorsese (https://www.findie.me/whats-a-ni...) and George Lucas (https://www.findie.me/freiheit) are of course not in HD. We're also looking at VR and 4K.
Bad publicity for freebooting notwithstanding, Facebook is building an impressive video business, and we are already using their file API to distribute our previews (each video on our site has a 5-15s preview) in Facebook native video. It just makes sense to work with an ecosystem that is both technologically advanced and fully social, in a way that YouTube never has been (until Google buys Twitter?) and Vimeo is not set up to be. Content creators want an aggregator that understands all major platforms and we strive to do that. In the near future, content that is aggregated on Facebook will also be monetised on company pages with a DRM system.
It's true that there are a lot of people jumping into video as you say, and I subscribe to @msuster's view that in order to succeed you must be an online technology company distributing video.
@paulrobertcary Looks great and hopefully you will find out if you have a great market fit. Where are the majority of the videos coming from? YouTube? Vimeo?
Thanks @craigjbarber! I checked out your site and subscribed - what a great idea! I look forward to reading the book.
The majority of our content comes from Vimeo, but also from YouTube and DailyMotion.
I hope that people will enjoy using Findie as much as I do, and we're coming up with cool ways of exploring content, like this: https://www.findie.me/chart.html
What would we have to do to make Findie a daily destination site for you? Thanks again!
Findie was made to do 2 things:
1) Bring you the best videos shot with a true cinematographic approach in a site/app with easy and interesting discovery options and algorithm-based custom recommendations
2) Give the creators of these videos a meritocratic marketplace to connect with and build an audience, and earn money for their work.
The name comes from Find + Indie. My mentor @scottcohen_ created The Orchard, the first company to truly give indie music artists global distribution, and it's now the largest digital distributor in the world.
There are some great sites that help you decide which Hollywood films to watch, and Netflix, Hulu, Apple, Amazon, HBO, etc. are all great companies. But to quote @msuster, "there is a world filled with professional producers of video content who are extraordinarily talented but lack access to Hollywood."
So we built an online technology company to find, curate, catalogue, market and monetize these videos on behalf of their creators, so they can stick to creating and let us worry about the rest.
Sure, with YouTube and Vimeo there is the rise of the "creatopreneur," but the vast majority of filmmakers and videographers would rather spend their time writing and shooting their next piece than plugging their work (something many will admit they both hate and are not very good at).
We're taking a different approach than most video sites: we care most about the emotional impact that stories told on video have. That's why we offer navigation by mood as a primary option. 68% of users tell us how they feel when they've watched something, so we know it's important to them.
We also track the lightness or darkness of a video's message, and the degree of sophistication it requires to be appreciated. That's best expressed in this chart: https://www.findie.me/chart.html where sophistication is highest at the bottom of the Y-axis, and lightness/darkness is expressed on the X-axis.
We're just at the very beginning with Findie, and I can't wait to share what else we're building behind the scenes. Being on Product Hunt makes perfect sense for us: a community of people crazy about tech products! I can't think of a better place to reach out to critical thinkers, subject matter experts, design and UX gurus, and people who spend their lives thinking about and facilitating product-market fit.
We're grateful for the opportunity given to us by @rrhoover and I'd like to thank my head of engineering @raduamarie and the rest of my team for their hard work in making this happen. See the whole team here: https://www.findie.me/about/
Thank you to everyone who checks out Findie. We're excited to hear from you.
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I love Findie. I love them so much I even invested my own money. :) The idea and the team remind me a lot of the period in the mid 90's when I started the Orchard with my biz partner Richard Gottehrer. I think Findie is perfectly positioned to take highly curated short form content to the masses. It has been sorted for music, almost with film and now there is this. High quality short form video made for the mobile generation.
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