Matcha: Your Social Video Guide – Blancer.com Tutorials and projects

When it comes to watching movies and TV shows, I am all in. Tasty snacks, comfy couch, cold beverages: you name it, I’ll have it. To me, watching videos is a phenomenal experience and I don’t like to be disturbed. That’s why I watch them all alone. No nags, gossips or useless banter when my eyes are glued to the screen.

This habit of mine annoys my friends to the core, as I never accompany them to the movie halls or a TV show marathon. But, I would gladly take their recommendations on what to watch next. At times, I need the help of an algorithm to feed my video addiction and use apps like Glue. I recently discovered Matcha and took it upon me to check if it’s any good.

Overview

Matcha pulls in your video subscriptions like Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and more to give you relevant recommendations of videos that you might like. The app does this based on your interests and your social graph. The web app is free and signing up for it is such a breeze with your existing Twitter or Facebook accounts.

Ease of Use

After a single click sign up, I was taken to the section of the app that displayed all the videos friends from my Twitter account have shared so far. I was amazed at this feature – all the videos shared by the people I follow in one place. Twitter timeline tends to be chaotic at all times and I do miss out on a lot of quality shares.

Videos Shared by Friends

It also helps a lot to filter videos out based on the service – say Hulu, Amazon, or iTunes. And the option to see only the free videos should be really useful for people from geographies where the premium video services don’t exist.

Video Details Page

Hover over the video in question to bring up options to mark the video as watched, share it with others and like it in Matcha. The queuing option makes it a whole lot easier to create a playlist and watch them all in one go. If you want to know more about the video, click on it to bring up the video details page. Here, in addition to a brief description, you could see the comments left by other users and add a comment of your own too.

Top Picks

Now that the easy part is done (relatively easy part in my opinion), we come to a tougher task – recommendations. I say it’s tough because recommendations should weigh in what you like and what the algorithm thinks you might like. To predict human interest and behaviour is a daunting task and is a great benchmark for any app. Based on the recommendations I received, I would say Matcha was fairly consistent.

Top Picks

It’s not yet to the level of Glue, but I trained Glue’s algorithm like crazy. There are options to like a recommendation or give it a pass, but I’m not sure if my selection tweaks the algorithm accordingly.

Newly Available Videos and Notifications

Newly Available

As the name implies, videos that are added recently at Netflix, Hulu, iTunes and Amazon show up here. The listings were a bit off and weren’t as accurate as the top pick suggestions that were largely in line with my interests. I am a vocal opponent of all kinds of reality shows and want them all off air, as they kill creativity. So, I was naturally not pleased to see Most Eligible: Dallas at the top of the list.

Since most of these premium video services have a whole lot of family and animated movies, having a No kids stuff filter makes a lot of sense. Check the filter and get all those gory zombie movies or the TV series with four women from NYC talking about all the inappropriate stuff in the world!

Again I wasn’t sure if my like or dislike inputs made a difference to my future recommendations. It would be really great if the developers considered creating a product tour page explaining a bit about how the algorithm works.

You don’t have to hop to and fro between various sections of the app to see if your friends have posted anything cool. The activity stream on the right pane keeps you updated if there is a new share.

Linking Accounts

Try linking your Netflix, Hulu, Facebook or YouTube accounts and make Matcha a central hub for all your online video watching needs. Besides, the suggestions you get could improve over time.

Final Thoughts

I hate being addicted to something and not being able live without it. That’s why I don’t even drink tea or coffee, and haven’t right from my childhood. But as I grew up, I was addicted to two things – Internet and movies (and then TV shows). I’m the kind of person who has the IMDB app (now their trivia app too!) on the homescreen of my iPhone and iPad.

Now, trust me when I say this, Matcha is really good. Not everyone is in the mood for a goofball YouTube video all the time. Having a genre filter all over the app, plays a vital role in saving a whole bunch of time. And I totally dig the weekly email recommendations they send out. You have heard it from the horse’s mouth. Go sign up!