VHX Classic
The VHX dashboard on beta launch day, April 11, 2011. From the launch post.
VHX Classic (2010–2015) was the first version of VHX: a website that turned YouTube, Vimeo and the rest of the web into a TV channel programmed by your friends.
You logged in and a video started playing. When it ended, the next one started. No grid of thumbnails, no “related videos,” just the best stuff your friends and curators had shared, full-browser, back to back. Casey and I built it after Star Wars Uncut, when web video was still mostly watched in tiny embeds on a laptop. As we put it in the beta launch post: “It’s sexy. We hope you weren’t planning on being productive today.”
Everything played through megaplaya.swf, our own Flash player. Flash, baby.
In March 2012 we started selling Aziz Ansari’s special for him. That was the start of VHX 2.0: direct sales of film and TV for creators, and the version that really worked, with Indie Game: The Movie, This American Life and thousands more after it. That story is on the VHX page. This page is about 1.0, the community video sharing site. It moved to community.vhx.tv in August 2012 and stayed up until early 2015.
Here’s the demo we made for the April 2011 beta launch:
"VHX Demo – Rough cut," April 2011. Original on Vimeo.
Timeline
- November 2010: VHX “coming soon”, with a full-screen Flash teaser at vhx.tv titled “Videos. Videos everywhere.” Our pre-launch domain was watchlater.org
- February 2011: Perhaps The Chillest Splash Page in the Universe, and “Collect, share and watch video”
- April 11, 2011: private beta, launched with the demo above. TechCrunch called it “your video dashboard for the entire internet”
- May 31, 2011: public beta and Channels, after about 5,000 people tried the private beta (GigaOM)
- July 6, 2011: the Movie Trailers channel, curated by Keith Calder
- August 2011: mobile web and iPad, and you no longer had to sign up to watch
- September 2011: the VHX API and megaplaya embed, launched at NYC Video Hack Day. Playlists went into beta the same month
- January 2012: VHX playlists, “Mixtapes for video”, open to everyone
- March 20, 2012: Aziz Ansari’s Dangerously Delicious goes on sale for $5, the start of VHX for Artists
- August 20, 2012: vhx.tv becomes the selling platform, and the community moves to community.vhx.tv
- February 2015: the last working capture of community.vhx.tv
"A fresh way to watch videos. Coming soon!" November 2010.
How it worked
- Dashboard: a feed of videos your friends shared, with comments, playing nonstop
- Channels: watch what your Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr friends posted, or what Boing Boing, Reddit, BuzzFeed and Laughing Squid were linking to. Plus “Our community,” a channel of curators we hand-picked
- Queue: the “watch later” button for the whole web. The app’s code name was literally
watchlater - Playlists: mixtapes of YouTube and Vimeo videos together, with animated GIF cover art, that you could embed anywhere
- Bookmarklet: on any page with a video, click “Add to VHX” to share it or queue it. The FAQ called it “the big Add to VHX button (it’s magenta, you can’t miss it)”
- Keyboard shortcuts: space to pause, J and K to skip, F for fullscreen, H to hide the sidebar and watch
The name came from the FAQ: “We wanted a name that sounded like a TV network. We chose VHX as a tribute to the VHS tapes we grew up with.”
Channels, from a May 2011 dev build.
My queue, 2011.
The bookmarklet on a Vimeo video, 2011.
The iPad version, August 2011. Note the Bellflower trailer "via @trailers." Screenshot from GigaOM.
Curators and playlists
The best part was the people. A few curators made VHX feel like a real channel:
- Movie Trailers, by film producer Keith Calder (The Wackness, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold). A nonstop channel of new trailers at
vhx.tv/#!/trailers, launched July 2011. Keith also made us a Halloween playlist and later invested in VHX. Sadly, nobody archived the channel itself. - Friday Videos, by Michael Eades (yewknee). His “weekly collection of ridiculous, stupid and (hopefully) entertaining videos,” which he moved over to VHX playlists in September 2011 “because I can add Vimeo and Youtube videos into one stream.” He kept it going on community.vhx.tv until December 2013. Michael also designed azizansari.com with us.
- Internet Memes 101, by me. 42 classics, from “All Your Base” and Star Wars Kid to Chocolate Rain, Double Rainbow and the Rickroll. 35 of them still exist, so you can play the surviving 35 back to back on YouTube.
- jdubs video xmix 2011, my 19 favorite music videos of 2011.
- Staff picks: a weekly staff playlist on community.vhx.tv in late 2012, like the week of August 20th, and Select Bumps, all of our bumpers in one place.
My own playlists were a decent snapshot of 2011–2012 internet: Rap Music, Cinnamon Challenge, Babies, Marriage Proposals, Animated GIF movies, Die Antwoord, Jurassic Park Top 10, They Will Regret Making This, Beatboxing and Turntablism. Casey had RoboCop and “Games I want to play.” Other people made OWLS, cats, and lots of weird music videos.
Keith Calder's Halloween playlist, October 2011.
Embedded playlists, January 2012.
Bumpers
Like any good TV network, we had bumpers between videos. Kornhaber Brown, Wreck and Salvage and Aaron Valdez made us a pile of them in spring 2011, with sound by Mike Rugnetta and Bryan Pugh.
More are on YouTube: Glow, Laser, CPU, Moon Is Essentially Gray, Hubble Zoom, One small step, Focus, Computer Experts, Please Adjust Tracking and Exercises.
The pre-launch splash page was its own little show:
Megaplaya and the API
megaplaya.swf was our own ActionScript 3 player. You gave it a list of YouTube, Vimeo or raw video URLs and it played them one after another, full-screen, with our playbar, “You’re watching…” pop-ups, a custom accent color and a JavaScript API (api_playQueue, api_nextVideo, api_growl and about 50 more). In September 2011 we opened it up with the VHX API: “Greetings, programs.” The docs from dev.vhx.tv still live on GitHub.
People built a bunch of little TV channels with it:
- Show Me Nonstop, Chad, Casey and me: type a search, watch forever
- Music Video Genome, Casey: “Pandora for music videos,” with Last.fm. The Atlantic liked it
- Storyteller, Abe Stanway, from the same hackday
- LocalTV: geotagged YouTube videos with almost no views, as internet public access
- Reblogvision and HypeTV: Tumblr and Hype Machine as TV
- Urban Dictionary TV, with Urban Dictionary’s founder Aaron Peckham
- KSTV for Kill Screen, Michael’s We Own This Town app for Nashville, Carlo Cabanilla’s XBMC plugin, IOCOSE’s First Viewer Television and Casey’s VHX Tumblr theme
When we pivoted, megaplaya got an Aziz skin and powered the first VHX sales too.
Music Video Genome, September 2011. Wayback Machine.
The archived megaplaya.swf from March 2012, running in Ruffle in 2026. The playbar and loading square still work. The YouTube and Vimeo Flash players it depended on are long gone, so it can't play anything.
community.vhx.tv
When vhx.tv became the selling platform in August 2012, we moved the old site to community.vhx.tv: “We started VHX as a fresh way to collect, curate, and share the web’s best content. A community was born and thousands of videos were watched, many starring cats.” No Film School checked in that December: “think of it as Twitter for video.” It ran on its own until early 2015.
By the end of 2012, 20,876 people had signed up. They had watched 972,469 videos, shared 104,005, liked 48,648 and queued 29,920, and followed each other 97,854 times.
Our internal stats board, December 26, 2012.
The Staff channel, late 2012. Via No Film School.
community.vhx.tv in October 2012, already pitching filmmakers. Wayback Machine.
Video
Casey and I on the pilot of GigaOM’s Google Hangouts show, July 2011, showing off some favorite videos:
Recorded by GigaOM.
Press
- VHX Wants To Be Your Video Dashboard For The Entire Internet, TechCrunch, April 11, 2011
- Emmy Award-Winning Internet Fame Professors Debut New Video Service, VHX, Betabeat, April 11, 2011
- VHX.tv – TV on the Internet, Laughing Squid, April 12, 2011
- VHX Wants To Change How You Watch Web Video, Mashable, April 13, 2011
- VHX is the TV-Esque Experience for the Web You Always Wanted, Tubefilter, April 13, 2011
- Social Video Site VHX.tv Could Win the Discovery War, GigaOM, May 29, 2011
- Channel Surfing, Netted by the Webbys, June 16, 2011: “one of the most successful ‘Internet as TV’ experiences we’ve ever seen”
- Hanging out with VHX.tv’s Jamie Wilkinson and Casey Pugh, GigaOM, July 14, 2011
- A Pandora for Music Video Junkies, The Atlantic, September 13, 2011
- Online Music Tools and Services Help You Find New Tunes, New York Times, October 20, 2011: “Remember when TV channels like MTV, VH1 and BET used to show music videos? VHX.TV aims to recreate those long-gone days”
- Video Pandora, Play-Forever-Lists, No Film School, December 13, 2012
Links
- The VHX blog, still up on Tumblr
- vhx.tv in February 2012, “A beautiful and fun way to watch videos”
- VHX API docs
Thanks to Casey Pugh, Chad Pugh, Keith Calder, Michael Eades, Kornhaber Brown, Wreck and Salvage, Aaron Valdez, Mike Rugnetta, Bryan Pugh, and everybody who shared a video.
See also: VHX, the company it became.