Introducing Shelby Genius on iOS

Shelby Genius is available today in the iOS App Store! Download it here.

While in the midst of building the next generation of Shelby, we learned that YouTube would no longer be a core app in iOS6. We knew YouTube would inevitably fill that void with their own app, but we had an idea that was too fun to pass up, so our iOS dev Arthur hacked it together in a couple weeks. Using a piece of the Shelby platform that hasn’t yet seen the light of day, we’re pretty excited to announce Shelby Genius.

Shelby Genius is search + serendipity. On iOS, we built Genius to be a very simple app. It supports searches across YouTube, Vimeo and Dailymotion and returns a list of results that serendipitously includes results from Shelby’s video graph.  

We have to admit it’s pretty fun searching for random stuff (see our list above), and seeing what Genius thinks, but we’re even more excited about some of the tech under the hood. In particular, the Genius app supports background streaming to AirPlay and continuous playback of video.

What does this mean to the average user? Run a Genius search for your favorite band, start playing video and send it to your AppleTV via airplay. Now start using another app on your phone - you’ll notice that Genius video keeps playing on your TV in the background. When the video is done, the next video in the results will start playing.

Though it’s just the result of a quick hack, we’re excited to ship it and potentially use more of Genius in other places within Shelby.

You can download it here and let us know what Genius searches you love!

iOS app may experience crashes

We have discovered a new bug which causes the iOS app to close immediately after login. We are currently working to crush this bug, and hope to have this resolved soon. To all of you who were affected, thank you for your patience.

To all of you who took the time to submit detailed bug reports, we are forever grateful. 

UPDATE: Issue has been resolved.

Join the team building the future of video on iOS

We. Love. iOS. 

iOS has changed the way we will compute for generations to come and enabled developers to build apps that made us fall in love with our iPhones, our iPads, and soon… our iTV’s. 

Believe the hype. Apple will build an amazing TV experience, we have a good idea of what it looks like and we want Shelby to be the best social video experience out there. F that… we want Shelby to be the best app. Period.

So far, we built an iOS app that is insanely easy to use, elegantly designed and has some features that are first of their kind. Now we are looking for the iOS developer who will take Shelby iOS to new heights of function and form, while delighting users with serendipitous video discovery.

Why?

Because we love video. It is an amazing medium—that is so powerful and yet so nascent online—and we believe that 1) video deserves its own home and 2) that home should be built socially.

Who are you?

You are—first and foremost—a great person. You are also an iOS developer who believes in building simple, beautiful products. You can code with the best and have great taste for design. You are curious about the world. You are not one to just do what you are told. You are not one for being managed. You are one for video.

Who are we? 

We are not a team full of “rockstars” or “ninjas” or “wizards.” We are not high on ourselves. We are just a team of passionate people who love building great products. We love to learn and we have a ton of fun while we do it. We may dabble in ping pong. We may play music from time to time. One of us may wear jorts. Most importantly, we love video. More on us here.

What will you do with us?

  • Revolutionize the way people discover and enjoy video
  • Work with great people on a lean, agile engineering team
  • Be challenged to build the best stuff you have ever created
  • Kick a dent in the universe

We are super excited about building Shelby—as a product, company and brand—and we are fortunate to have the support of some of the best investors in the game. We offer healthcare, we work on the best equipment, we hang our hats in our own office at 23rd and Park in NYC, and we believe in G.S.D., so our PTO policy is more of a policy than a practice…

If you are interested, we would love to meet you. Please get in touch. Email hiring+ios@shelby.tv and please include links to any apps you built.

Announcing Shelby iPad/iPhone apps + public beta!

When we initially thought of Shelby.tv, we knew at least one thing… that tablets, the iPad in particular, are a complete game-changer for video consumption. Which is why I am very proud to announce the release of a native iOS Shelby application for the iPad and the iPhone!

We’d love for you to go download the app from the app store and y’know… a 5-star rating would be cool, too. ;)

With this announcement, we are also taking Shelby out of “private alpha” and releasing a public beta. Which means whether or not you’ve been waiting for an invite, you can check out Shelby.tv on the web right now.

With your feedback, we’ve worked really hard to improve the speed, performance and overall user experience of Shelby on the web, and translated that into robust iOS apps. The best part is that the web and iOS apps work really well together with the Shelby bookmarklet - allowing you to save videos to watch later at your convenience.

I’m not going to list all of the great features here… COUGH - deduplication! - AHEM… excuse me… but we will blog about those features here, so follow us to learn more or you can watch this great demo video done by Mark…

Finally, we just want to say thank you. Building Shelby has been a dream so far. We are really grateful for all of your feedback, ideas, and support and we hope you like this, our first real release of Shelby.tv

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