The Justin.tv platform makes it easy for anyone to broadcast live video, using a PC webcam or a mobile phone running Android or iOS. But the folks at Justin.tv realized that 90% of their views were coming from archived video, not live broadcasts. So today the company launched a new type of mobile video app. It’s called SocialCam, and it makes it easy to shoot and share videos using your mobile device.
When you launch SocialCam for the first time, you’re asked to login with your Facebook credentials. From there, SocialCam will search for friends that are already using the service and show you a feed of the latest videos from your contacts. You can also click the “Yours” tab to see the latest videos you’ve shared.
Tap the camera icon in the middle of the toolbar and you can shoot a video yourself. Once you stop recording, SocialCam will immediately start to upload the video to the web. While it uploads, you can give your video a title and tag people that are in the movie. Then you can share the video with your contacts on Facebook, Twitter, or shoot an email with a link to the video.
The viewing experience is also social. After viewing any video in SocialCam, you’ll see an info screen which shows comments and a Like button. You can add comments, join a discussion, or give a video a thumbs up. Videos in your feed will also show icons letting you know how many comments and/or likes each movie has.
Sure, there are already plenty of apps that let you shoot videos and share them with the world on YouTube, Facebook, or other platforms. But the SocialCam experience looks like a great way to organize the videos you want to share just with a select group of friends.
Probably the best reason to use SocialCam instead of the official Facebook app for uploading photos is that SocialCam actually begins uploading a video while you’re still shooting it, which makes uploads a lot faster. The app taxes advantage of the Justin.tv live streaming technology and sends video to the server so that when you’re done shooting your video, most of it is already online.
SocialCam is available as a free download from the iTunes App Store and Android Market.
You can find a few more screenshots after the break.
via Mashable
