My.tv as another way to reach viewers?

My.tv is a new service similar to the others I've written about, such as tumblr and pinterest. I came across it while looking at ads on MyLikes and thought it sounded interesting.

Whereas something like tumblr is primarily focused on sharing images, My.tv is focused on sharing videos you find online.

To help promote their service My.tv has a contest that calculates how many referrals your channel is bringing to their website.  The prize is an Amazon gift card.... which could actually be very useful to me given I have a large number of games and books I want to order off Amazon.

Anyway after making an account using Facebook Connect, I was asked to choose what kind of videos I want to be shown,

Youtube does a pretty good job of flooding my feeds with music videos as it is, so I really don't need to sign up for any of those feeds. Instead I signed up for a few other feeds that Youtube tends to hide from me, just to help figure out if My.tv will actually show me content Youtube has been burying in the search results.

The next step is to add some videos to your own channel. This is done by clicking on one of those empty dropboxes, which brings up a menu where you can paste a URL that goes directly to a Youtube video.

The service only works with Youtube at the moment and doesn't appear to have plans to incorporate other streaming services. For example, I tried pasting in the URL to one of my blip.tv videos and it wouldn't accept it.

Still being able to easily promote your Youtube videos is pretty good. Youtube is the best streaming video site right now anyway, even if it is having a ton of other issues with it's recommended video and subscriber feeds.

What is also neat is that you can add other people's videos to your channel, much like a Youtube playlist. This can be very useful for cross-promoting with other Youtube Partners who make similar content to your own, allowing you to share each other's promotion efforts and increase the reach of your My.tv channel; for example, someone might discover the video of your friend and then while watching that video they will see your own videos on the channel!

This is what my RPG Fanatic My.tv Youtube channel looks like after adding a bunch of my videos to it,

At the top you have a tab marked, 'My Feed' which will display all the various content related to the categories you chose when you made your account,

Unfortunately it seems the order of videos is determined by how many views it has on Youtube; in this case, Evolution of Dance is dominating my feed because it's one of the most highly watched videos on Youtube.

So this makes the feed pretty damn worthless for Youtube Partners who actually need to get their content seen by new viewers, or people who want to discover content that is buried on Youtube.

Granted, once you actually subscribe to other user's channels it starts only displaying videos from those channels...but since there is no way to see all the videos uploaded without having to first subscribe, the feed tab is pretty crappy.

However, all is not completely lost. The 'Browse' menu does have some promise,

The order doesn't appear to be determined by how popular the content is, so theoretically someone can discover new content here.

The only problem is that it organizes by user names. You have no idea who these people are. This is the same problem that Youtube's browse channel menus have; other than the channel name and the image, you don't know what kind of content is there. Why would anyone click on these icons if they don't have enough information to do so?

There is also seemingly no 'Search' box, so you can't even search through all the videos uploaded to My.tv to see what might be available.

It seems the only way you can discover new videos with this site is if your friends sync their My.tv account with Facebook and then actually go to the bother of adding videos to their My.tv account. It is MUCH EASIER to just post the Youtube videos onto Facebook directly without using this middle man website.

My.tv has a long way to go until it is going to be something that actually drives traffic to Youtube videos but it has promise, so it might be beneficial to jump on board while it's relatively new so when the site is useful your content will already be there.