Daft Punk’s 4th studio album isn’t even out for another few weeks but they’re already spawning some incredible cover versions and alternate takes of their lead single, ‘Get Lucky.’

The best one so far is courtesy of Igor Presnyakov with a virtuoso acoustic guitar interpretation of the popular clubber tune. It’s perfectly loungy and elevator with just enough soul to make this a can’t miss listen.

http://telly.com/HZAV81


Next is a sweet alteration to Pharrell’s voice (singer and collaborator on “Get Lucky”) as it gets pitch-shifted and turns out sounding like none other than the KING OF POP!


http://telly.com/H7QZE1


This cover from Daughter takes “Get Lucky” in an entirely new and unexpected direction. Notice the tempo slows down and beautifully changes the the mood into something truly haunting…


http://telly.com/J4FBUG



And finally, one more fantastic cover…

http://telly.com/JVZ29A

BONUS!

Apparently cockatoo’s love Daft Punk, too!

http://telly.com/IPV5GI

As always, we welcome your thoughts and feedback. Please feel free to ask us any questions at any of our support channels:

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Capturing video is easy! Capturing GOOD video…not so much. Luckily, using the Telly iOS app makes the process really simple and streamlined.

Check out our video for more info on how to make great videos…



Below is a list of all our filters and an explanation for each. They’re all unique and all perform best under specific conditions, which we detail out so you can get the most out of your videos.

The “Hollywood” effect is best shot in a well lit area. The saturation levels have been set such that each video has a color range that makes more detail visible. The iOS has a white balance feature that brings down exposure levels so an optimal exposure level was used to allow for both indoor and outdoor videos to be close to the same.

The “Tilt Shift” effect can make a video look like it captured miniature objects. The effect uses a circular focus area and blurring to have the focus area look a lot smaller. The side by side comparison shows a video of a phone underneath a monitor. For this to be of even greater effect you should use distant objects. Available for iPhone 4s and above.

The “1960’s” filter is a colorized version of the 1920’s filter without some of the film flaws that were prevalent in the 1920’s film process, such as dust particles and hair particles. The scene color is muted as cameras of the 1960’s picked up on vibrant colors, as well as today’s cameras.

The “Fashion” filter adds a little Cobalt blue hue to the scene. This was indicative of fashion photography in the past. The Hollywood filter uses something very similar but with better set effects applied. Scenes for this one would do well in both indoor and outdoor settings.

The “Morning” filter is best shot in more bight scenes. It gives shots that early morning glow and a warm feeling. This filter works well with any scene and almost any lighting.



The “1920’s” filter is best shown with old antique-like scenes. While it can make any scene look antique, it is particularly effective with vintage objects. Also a little bit less lighting helps to make the scene look more vintage. The bright sun adds a lot of exposure, which wasn’t possible in the 1920s.

The “Neon” filter is best shot with a lot of straight edges in the scene. Indoor scenes or scenes of buildings with hard edges in the scene produce the best Neon outline.

The “Outline” filter is one that replicates the old “Ah-Ha!” video of the 80’s. Like the Neon filter, this uses hard edges to determine an outline and then uses a black and white pattern across the non-edges to achieve a hand drawn image look.

The “Cartoon” filter uses hard edges, like Neon and Outline. However, this picks the “average color” in an area and smoothly “toons” the scene. The filter can be used anywhere and faces are particularly interesting.

The “Fish Eye” filter works in any scene and distorts the subject to look like a fun house mirror. This is probably best shot with slow movement of the camera. Quick camera movements in the scene can actually make you quite queasy.



As always, we welcome your thoughts and feedback. Please feel free to ask us any questions at any of our support channels:

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If you didn’t know Star Wars was coming back in 2015, sans George Lucas, then you either live in the Sarlacc Pit or you perished on Vulcan when JJ Abrams broke the timeline continuity of the 2009 Star Trek reboot. Good thing JJ Abrams isn’t directing the new Star Wars…oh wait a minute…

Han Solo, aka Harrison Ford, recently joined Jimmy Kimmel on his show for a quick chat. Little did Jimmy know that the audience was stacked with Star Wars fans ready to ask the galaxy’s greatest scoundrel/smuggler Episode 7 questions! Unfortunately, he wasn’t willing to answer any Star Wars questions and FLIPS OUT!



http://telly.com/GA4LT5



Recently on the hit show, Parks and Recreation, funnyman Patton Oswalt give a FULL 8 minute citizen filibuster on his proposed Episode VII plot! But he doesn’t stop at Star Wars…watch him devolve everybody’s favorite space adventure into just about every Sci-Fi story known to man!



http://telly.com/G10OAB



Now that the transformation is complete, Star Wars belongs to the Empire. The Disney Empire. Watch all your favorite characters don their new roles as citizens of the new Galactic Disney Empire!



http://telly.com/G07GAE



And finally, a full Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope recap done in 60 seconds! This clever little video embraces the “speedrun” style you’d see in video games like Super Mario Bros. Enjoy.



http://telly.com/H7TRGV

As always, we welcome your thoughts and feedback. Please feel free to ask us any questions at any of our support channels:

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Hunter Walk’s insightful post “Why Video Discovery Startups All Fail” has ignited a healthy discussion of the video discovery startup space, both in startup land press as well as in the Telly offices. We have a ton of respect for Hunter and YouTube, and we have been talking about this a lot at Telly the last few days. We wanted to share some of our reactions. You should definitely check his post out…but here are the main points that Hunter makes:

• Verticalized content needs context not just collections
• Horizontal content needs to solve search not just browse or curation
• Social video is not a standalone product, just a signal
• It’s hard to make money on other people’s video when you can’t monetize it directly

Through our discussions we’ve realized that there is a key difference between mobile video discovery and video discovery on the web. We’re off to a good start with Telly’s mobile products - 1.5 million app downloads and 51% MAU/Registrations. We believe two key factors have contributed to that success:

1. Mobile video is largely a low intent discovery process
2. Social curated content and virality are extremely valuable signals for low intent discovery

Mobile Video Is Largely A Low-Intent Discovery Process

When we first started Telly, we tested the Pinterest for Video hypothesis, as other startups have done and some continue to do. Our web product was based on a Collections model allowing users to organize videos by vertical themes (e.g. cooking videos), but we learned quickly that Hunter’s insights held true for us - this was not compelling enough of an experience to add real value quickly and cause new users to activate and retain.

However, we also learned that mobile is a completely different story. The context in which users discover content on mobile is fundamentally different - it is far more of a low intent discovery process than on the desktop. When was the last time you were on the bus and thought, “I want to search for a specific video?” It’s not a common use case. Chances are you said you wanted to “snack” on content. You wanted to see what’s going on with your friends and opened Facebook. You wondered what the world was focused on and opened Twitter. You wanted to read your favorite blogs and opened Flipboard. Or, you wanted to check out a friend’s photos and opened Instagram.  

These are all low intent discovery apps, where search is highly de-emphasized, which is much different from the web where users have the time to dive deeper for something specific. No one, YouTube included, has fully solved low-intent mobile video discovery, the way Instagram has for photos or Twitter for news. This is why so many startups are active in the mobile video discovery space. We agree with Hunter that there is not room for tons of different video destinations, as it’s too much mental load on the user to segment video apps by intent. This is especially true on mobile where the average mobile user relies on only eight apps per day.  However, as mobile video consumption continues to skyrocket it’s reasonable to presume that a few video-focused apps will figure out how to master low intent discovery and will rise to become the mainstream app for watching mobile videos every day. This is why Telly is in the game.  

Socially Curated Content & Virality Are Extremely Valuable Signals For Low-Intent Discovery

So how do you master low intent discovery on mobile and become a daily app for users? We’ve seen success across two key discovery vectors: social and virality.

Social should be no surprise - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram - many of today’s breakout mobile low-intent discovery apps leverage social as the key discovery mechanism. And why is social working? Low-intent discovery demands a higher level of personalization. Social is an extremely important personalization signal when you’re on-the-go and looking to “snack” on content, but not diving into content around a specific interest.

Our ‘My Telly’ feed utilizes social context from signals like what friends on Telly have watched or liked, in addition to external networks like what your friends are Liking on Facebook. Our personalized feed consists of both UGC content created and shared on Telly, as well as video from any of the 140 embed video sites that Telly supports.  Feedback from our community has indicated that a UGC-only discovery experience, such as Viddy or SocialCam, is not compelling enough to be a go-to-daily app for video discovery. They want their friends’ video of their kids followed by the dancing cat that got a million views in the last 4 hours in one app.

We also learned that a large number of our millions of monthly video views on mobile come from viral content - fans coming to see an artist’s backstage clip or a video of a laughing baby that captures the internet’s heart for a few hours. This type of content breaks out for a short amount of time, and then is essentially dead. Surfacing the real-time nature of interesting video, much as Twitter does for news and information, is something users aren’t specifically looking for and can’t be easily categorized or searched for.

Since updating our Telly apps on this product thesis earlier this year, we’ve seen our our video views per user increase 3x and we are acquiring roughly 120k new installs per week organically. We are consistently ranked only behind YouTube as the next most popular video app in the app store, and our app rating is 4.5 starts. We still have a long way to go to reach our goals, but it’s a good start.

Important to note that when we say mobile we are referring to our phone based apps, but it’s a fair assumption that as we move deeper toward an app-based ecosystem on the tablet and TV, many of the same differences that separate mobile from the web will hold.  Specifically, a discovery method powered by a few handfuls of apps that mostly rest on low or medium-intent discovery methods and with less of a focus on search.  

There Is A Business Here

As for a business model, we absolutely agree that a content experience that solely relies on YouTube in order to monetize is not scalable. Telly consists of hosted content as well as embedded, which gives us a content experience not solely dependent on YouTube. Additionally, providing brands and marketers with an experience to do native advertising through promoted videos and a UI that presents those videos in-stream as opposed to pre/post roles is a huge opportunity. With video ad spend expected to reach $8B online and $73B on TV by 2016 (eMarketer), this is very much a venture fundable space.

Say hello to the very talented singer/songwriter, Nina Nesbitt! She’s a relative newcomer to Telly but don’t let that fool you! She’s busy on her Telly profile with lots of updated content. You can catch her comings-and-goings right here:

http://telly.com/ninanesbitt

Nina’s “Stay Out” EP is currently #5 on iTunes, so lets help her get to #1!

But that’s not all we have going on with the Swedish/Scottish songstress! We’ve teamed up with her to add her hit song, “Boy” to the Telly tracklist!

Don’t believe us? Get the scoop from Nina herself!

http://telly.com/C0OZSR

So now you can add Nina’s tune to any video you post with the Telly app. Nina’s song (and all of our provided tracks) will seamlessly sync to the Total Running Time (TRT) of your video to start and end as if the tune was edited just for you. And don’t forget to use the #BoyTelly hashtag so Nina can follow all your posts!

Get Telly on the App Store        Get Telly on Google Play

For more info on Nina, check out these links!

As always, we welcome your thoughts and feedback. Please feel free to ask us any questions at any of our support channels:

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