Today, we are thrilled to officially release Chill into the world (currently you’ll need a a friend from Facebook on the service to participate).
We appreciate every ounce of support we’ve received in the past few months. Building a product—as many of you know—is a labor of love and sacrifice. To the other creators living the dream like us, keep building.
It’s been quite a ride over the past year exploring new social technologies. This past March, during the development of our first social endeavor — Namesake — we launched a product called “synchronous video.”
The concept was simple: allow people to communicate in real-time around streaming media. Like most consumer Web products, ”synchronous video” was built on a whim. We had no idea if our users would find this concept even remotely interesting. Moreover, like most successful accidents, it was our customers that made us aware how cool they believed the concept was. So much for our brilliant product sense…
On April 20th, 2011, the puzzle pieces started to come together. President Obama, Mark Zuckerberg and 700 Facebook employees gathered at Facebook HQ to hold a Town Hall Meeting organized by The White House. The event was livestreamed.
What happened next changed how we viewed the world. On Namesake, there were hundreds of our users sharing interesting conversation around the event as they watched it together. We realized that video—much like images and text—with a dash of alchemy can be made into a social experience.
It became abundantly clear that the mission of creating a social experience around video was worth pursuing.
From the days of The Nickelodeon theaters, watching moving images has always been social. Unfortunately for the consumer, TV, movies and the clip landscape have been locked down for decades due to a variety of economic and technical reasons. As you all know, the Internet and content sites such as YouTube and Hulu are starting to put the customer viewing experience first. Still, we want something even more social out of our consumption environment. We want to know what out friends are watching, what they are saying, and how they feel at particular moments. It’s only human. We inherently crave that sort of connection.
We’ve always believed that flipping through endless channels and passing around non-social links is a terrible way to experience content. Chill is our first swing at attempting to put the viewer and her friends first.
So what is Chill? Chill is a place for people to watch video together. We’ve been saying all along, “everything is better with friends,” and this applies to watching video. And the thing is, you already know this to be true. How many times have you swiveled your laptop around to show friends or colleagues a funny clip on YouTube? Or emailed a video clip to a sibling or friend across the country just to put a smile on their face? It happens every day. This is exactly the analog behavior we’re attempting to mimic on Chill.
Our goal is to create a simple, fun and social environment for people to express themselves through the sharing of video.
We believe people want richer, more immersive social experiences on the Web—not just in video. Anyone should be able to easily create their own channel (we call them lounges), program it how they want, and enjoy it with others. And to do that, we’ve decided to deeply integrate Chill into Facebook and Twitter to make it dead-simple for people to invite friends to watch video together.
