Voddler is a new video startup that launch back in private beta back in July 2009. Currently it is rumoured that only 1,500 people have access to the site, so we wanted to run through the service for everyone else.
Voddler won’t be launched officially until sometime this fall, and then only in the Nordic countries for starters. The agenda is to go global, though.
Voddler aims to do for movies and TV series what Spotify is doing for music. Although in private beta Voddler already seems to be getting a lot of buzz in Scandinavia, so we hope to let everyone else know about it.
Voddler is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, Voddler will also be providing a Linux-based box with a pre-installed client that you can easily connect to your TV to get that home cinema feel.
Here below is a screenshot of the latest design of the landing page, designed to work best on widescreen televisions.
Movies are of course a lot more bandwidth-intensive than music. How well Voddler works for you will depend on your Internet connection. To get 1080p HD quality you should have an 8 Mbit/s connection, for 720p HD quality you should have a 5 Mbit/s connection, and for DVD quality you should have a 2.5 Mbit/s connection. Contrast this with Spotify which only has to deal with music streaming and therefore works just fine with a mere 256 kbit/s connection.
There’s a whole host of music streaming solutions out there now; Last.FM, Spotify, SeeqPod, SongBird. All of them trying to carve out a little niche in the rapidly changing online music market. Any new player in the market has really got to stand out in terms of content and user experience if it hopes to get any kind of traction.
So how does Muzzic differ from it’s competitors, and how does it hope to gain users’ loyalty? They’ve got the content issue fairly well covered; their program crawls YouTube’s catalogue, logging all the songs by title and artist. The search seems pretty comprehensive – even odd little things like Kutiman’s Thru You series, and Swede Mason’s hilarious oddities are recognised.
There’s also a little sidebar to browse user’s upload channels by genre – this is pretty limited though, and there’s no way of knowing what you’re going to find in one particular person’s upload list. They work fairly well as mini radio stations or preset playlists though. You can build your own playlists, a single track at a time, or pick tracks to play from your search results. Muziic’s player also brings down the video for whatever you might be watching and plays it in a tiny little window next to the progress bar.
So is it any good? It’s better than last.fm for the fact that you can pick your own specific tracks, rather than have to listen to something like what you had in mind, but essentially it’s like a miniature version of a YouTube quicklist, nothing massively innovative, and more limited than SongBird in that it only draws down from YouTube – a massive catalogue, granted, but not compared to pulling down tracks from the whole web, especially now YouTube has vowed to take down all the content from PRS artists. Not having any audio ads is nice, but the playlist management is so much more comprehensive and cool on Spotify that I’d bear Roberta whining on at me, as well as their more limited catalogue for the privilige of playing through my search results and not having to add tracks to a list one at a time. There’s no music discovery functionality, and worst of all, the tracks occasionally just stop playing for no reason.
All in all a nice try, and probably worth experimenting with before you go back to Spotify.
