Watch All Your Videos in One Place With Denso

Ever since I cut the cord on cable about a year ago, I have increased my watching and searching for videos on the net. Both Hulu Plus and Netflix have been a staple on my iOS devices for watching mainstream shows. But I have been noticing the trend in media which, like a lot of other things, have started to become more social and interactive.

To be perfectly honest, I never really got into the social aspect of watching videos and the apps that came out for them. But, for some reason, when I saw this app named Denso, it started to all make sense to me a bit more and I actually started to get more interested in the videos that are being shared on my social accounts and around the net. Was it the app or was it the fact that I just now “got it?” I’m not sure, but feel free to read more and you can be the judge.

Getting Started

The easiest way to understand Denso is to envision it as a place where you can view videos that you are interested in. The first thing that you need to do is setup your account by linking your Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and/or Google Reader accounts. It will then pull all the videos from these accounts into your Denso library.

But the video adding doesn’t stop there; you have the option to add more through the different channels that Denso provides. Each channel includes a variety of different websites that you can select from. Once you are done selecting the websites, Denso organizes them all on your homepage into different channels based upon your social networks and the category of the videos you subscribed to.

Watching and Interacting

Getting your videos is only the start of the app, it is watching and interacting with them that really make the app what it is. They can be watched by tapping on different categories or channels that you have previously set up. In each channel you will see the title of videos and a small snapshot of the video itself. You can scroll through to see a video that you want to watch and also swipe left to right between them to view the next one.

One of the features that I have come to appreciate is the search function of Denso. When you are in a channel you can type something in the search box and it will find videos within that channel that fit your query. For example, if I was in The Next Web’s channel and I wanted to see videos only on Apple, I could do a search for it. I like this feature because if there are only certain types of videos that I want to see within a channel, and this helps filter through all the noise. The only thing that I wish the search function could do is to be able to do a search in more than just one website.

In Denso, there is some social interaction as well, where you can send a video to either Facebook or Twitter or just email them. They can also be given a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down,” depending on how you want to rate it. Unfortunately, there is no place for comments and I think that would be a good next step as far as interaction within videos are concerned. If you don’t have time to watch your video right away, you can always save it for later watching. In some instances, they can also be downloaded — with the exception of You Tube videos, which are restricted.

The Watch Later feature of Denso is actually a pretty neat feature to have, and I think it is the best part of the app. Not only can you watch videos that you have saved from Denso itself, but you can watch videos that have been imported from other places. For example, any videos that you have saved with Evernote, Instapaper, Readability, Vimeo and YouTube can be watched from within the app. Being that I save videos from the different websites and also on YouTube and Vimeo, this is a great way to watch all of them in one place.

Final Thoughts

There are a lot of things to like about Denso, from the interface to the watching of videos, and they seem to have done a pretty good job. I found it very easy to set up my channels and select content that I wanted to watch, and I definitely loved the fact that I could import videos from other services. One thing that left me a little disappointed is the lack of channels they offered from within the app itself. Granted, you can import your videos from other places, but it would have been nice to be able to have more channels available within the app to begin with.

Denso also has apps for the iPad as well as the web, which are both very nice to use because of the bigger screen real estate. Best of all, they are all free (at least for the time being). I can definitely see myself using this app as my central hub for my videos that I watch from the internet. Go and download the app and let us know what you think about it in the comments.