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Rheo — Watch, discover, and react to great videos
Rheo is a site and iPhone app that delivers a personalized stream of short-form video content from around the web. We bring you the best of late night comedy, as well as breaking up-to-date news, technology, music videos plus an endless library of the best short-form content teed up for you on demand.
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Been playing with the app... I love how quickly one video follows the other one. It transforms the browsing experience to have each subsequent video show up right away. Great job!
Awesome. Can you push to Chromecast-powered devices? I.e., my use case is casting from my phone (Android) to my TV from my couch.
@lldavedave Thanks! We are excited for people to also discover the work from the Hydric Media team on https://rheo.tv on desktop and mobile!
@nataliediver what's the story behind Rheo - been following your story for a while but would love to know origins of the app
It was first on Apple TV only right? What has happened since then?
@bentossell Exactly right! We launched on Apple TV in May of 2016 as the simplest way to watch great videos on your TV. The thesis was to truly simplify the experience of watching content by removing search, menus, channel lists, etc. and instead give users a personalized stream of great videos. At every junction, we tried to reduce the number of decisions a user is faced with. We just wanted watching and finding great content to be a lot easier.
Since then, we've done a lot of learning and that's why we introduced Rheo for iPhone, desktop and mobile web today. We realized that to truly execute our vision we really needed to bring Rheo to the platforms that people use every day, multiple times a day.
On iPhone, in addition to a super fast watching experience, we introduced a social layer to Rheo. We felt that sharing and communicating about video has become such an integral part of our lives that we wanted to build it right into the experience. Since one of our company values is 'Think in Video,' we're starting by introducing a camera-based sharing paradigm where people can provide their commentary on videos they love and cultivate their own audience. We'll see how people like it and adjust as needed over time.
On desktop web, we really wanted to focus on creating a super clean watching experience like we have on Apple TV. We took care to pare back the UI as much as we could to make the web experience all about the content. A tip for the Product Hunters out there: try shrinking the window down and sticking it in the corner of your screen.
For mobile web, we took the same approach as desktop. Sometimes you just want to load up a video on your phone's browser and have it play really fast, so we focused on that. We also made sure it would autoplay inline, just like all of our other experiences, even though that was tricky.
And of course we didn't forget about where it all began, Apple TV. When a friend creates new Reaction on iPhone it will show up right in your stream if you are watching Rheo on your TV. We loveeeee the TV interface, so expect more to come from us there.
I hope this answers your question!
@nataliediver I love Rheo, I have been using the Apple TV app since it launched for literally hours a day. That being said I might hold off on mobile and desktop, otherwise I won't get anything done lol. Love the Apple TV app, its become a news , comedy, and education source for me. Congrats and good luck
@harisamin That's awesome! Thanks so much for the support :) The App will be great for little snippets of knowledge on the way home!
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