Tumblr’s advantage is that it lets strangers share their interest over a common platform. With its new app Cabana, however, Tumblr is attempting something different by providing group video chat for six friends in real time. More precisely, these many friends can watch a YouTube video sitting in different places and get connected over one chat room.
The new app is not an in-house product but aroused interest in Tumblr CEO David Karp after he watched a demo. As reported by Venturebeat: “Cabana emerged from an incubator called Polyvore Labs, which consists of engineers, product managers and designers who build and ship products quickly to see what kind of early traction they garner. With some tests and surveys carried out through Tumblr, the company got wind of the product and brought the team behind it “into the Tumblr umbrella” to bring a working version of Cabana to the market.”
In what it calls a ‘digital couch’, a user can add members via address book from their phone. A person can participate in one ‘room’ at a time and leave or rejoin as they wish. The ‘rooms’ can either be set private or public.
The Verge sees the addition like this: “The app offers Tumblr an opportunity to expand its reach by connecting people in a very different way than it does today. That may be an important goal for the company: the research firm eMarketer pegs Tumblr’s US users at around 23 million — a third as many as Instagram, which launched three years later.”
Tumblr is not considered a potential revenue maker for Yahoo since the 2013 acquisition. The rumoured Verizon acquisition of Yahoo also poses the question — how is Tumblr going to survive in the future.
TechCrunch points out that there are similar players in the scene such as Gaze, MyCircleTV, ShareTube, Togethr TV, Rabbit, Rave, Houseparty and even YouTube’s experimentation on app space with Uptime. “So the question is not really whether co-watching is going to be a thing — it’s a thing — but, rather it’s who will win this thing if this is a thing that is to be won,” it writes. Launched in the US, Cabana would come to Android in a few week’s time.
