TwitVid rebrands as Telly: A video discovery platform

San Francisco startup outgrows its name, wants to be the video landing page of tomorrow

Three years after launching its short-video sharing service, Twitvid has rebranded itself as a destination video-sharing service called Telly.

I had a sneaking suspicion that TwitVid was going to have to pivot a lot and change its name when I spoke with its CEO and co-founder Mo Al Adham back in December. At that point TwitVid was pivoting its service from an easy way to tweet video clips to friends and the public to a place to share and discover lots of videos based on content tags and friends with content you enjoy.

Let's face it, a lot of tech companies are fast-moving organisms that grab a name that is short, easy to remember and fits what they do at that moment, but most startups do a lot of shifting over their first few years and many do end up changing their names.

Currently, Telly users can upload their own videos, explore friend's videos and have access to content from sites like YouTube, Vimeo, CNN and ESPN.

When you sign up for Telly, you can start crafting the topics of videos you would prefer and then a personalized feed is created. It becomes a more personalized YouTube situation where Al Adham is hoping people can just come and explore the expansive amount of video content they manage.

Back in March, Twitvid acquired daily deals aggregator Frugalo and in May it acquired personalized music video service Cull.tv. In both cases, TwitVid was really looking for talent grabs that could beef up the service site it was crafting.

Telly currently limited to its Web-based service but there is talk about expanding into mobile and tablets. 

Al Adham told me that the new TwitVid goal is to be the landing page that people go to in order to consume their video content for the day, wherever the content originated (be it YouTube or Vimeo or TwitVid itself.) 

While the service can be used as a streaming service and allow users to auto-play the content in their feed, users can also broadcast a video to the people that follow their activity or channel -- which is essentially like a retweet.

YouTube recently launched its efforts to create more channels and original, exclusive content so that users can create a high-quality feed for longer watching on a platform originally designed for 3-4 minute snipits. 

Advertisers and producers are excited by the change in online video consumption habits, the trick now is to create a platform model that serves the consumer, creators and advertisers needs as equally as possible.