Now that it’s winter time, I’m spending more time on my treadmill. While I run naked when I’m outside (no headphones, no music), I find running on a treadmill to be mindnumbingly dull. Pluck my eyeballs out, swallow them, then poke my fingers in my ears and pull out my cochlea, and then punch myself over and over again in the face until FAKEGRIMLOCK comes and rescues me from myself kind of dull.
My TV show this winter is Entourage. Amy won’t watch it, so I’m watching it on my iPad while running. I finished Season 1 yesterday and am loving it. Today, when I went downstairs to pound out 70 boring, excruciating, nose hair pulling, sweat all over my iPad minutes, I realized I had not yet downloaded Season 2. And, when I looked in my video folder on my iPad, I realized I didn’t have anything in it I hadn’t seen since Pan Am, which I’d started downloading on my laptop, somehow hadn’t synced over WiFi (grrrrrr).
So – I started running. My iPad was in front of me and I started poking around. I noticed the Shelby.tv app. The Shelby team was one of my favorites from the first TechStars NY program. I ran with Reece Pacheco every time I was in NY (he was always very kind to me), loved their spirt, and thought they did a great job of pivoting away from something they were interested in, but not in love with, to something they were super passionate about. While Shelby.tv isn’t the kind of thing we invest in, several of my good friends in the VC world do and I was psyched when Rich Levandov from Avalon led their round.
I hadn’t played with Shelby.tv for a while since I don’t ever just browse video on my iPad. I clicked the Shelby.tv icon. 65 minutes later my run was over and I was still watching amazing video. Shelby.tv picks up any video link in your Twitter stream or on your Facebook news feed. It then just plays them in reverse chron order. You can interact with the individual videos, skip them, tweet or like them, or just do what I did and watch them. There was only one in the stream of about 15 that I watched that I wasn’t interested in and one I had already seen. The rest were fascinating, both in what I saw, what people where curating for me, and how quickly they made the time pass on the treadmill.
Reece et. al. – nice job. I think you just solved my “I’m bored, on my treadmill, and shit I forgot to download the latest season of that thing” problem.