Viddy Review for iPhone and iPod Touch – 15 Seconds of Fame Video Sharing

Fifteen seconds is all that stands between you and your moment of fame. The challenge if you choose to accept it is to think up the craziest, funniest, wackiest or even cutest moments – capturing them in a video which you share on-line to achieve notoriety.

Viddy is an app that allows you to do just that while also giving you access to a social gathering of individuals keen to share and rate videos, while also offering a few effects and other abilities to spice up your creation.

First of all you need to create an account, which is completely free. Once registered, you can mingle with the other folk who inhabit the Viddy universe by sharing your own creations and interacting with other submissions.

Imagine Twitter cross with Instagram with videos at its heart and you may have an inkling of what Viddy actually comprises of. The ability to ‘like’, comment and tag are familiar terms in social networking these days and Viddy uses these to good effect within the app.

Within Viddy, you can check the ‘Feed’ section to view videos by people you have chosen to follow, display videos that are popular or are trending. You can save your favourite videos and this has its own area within the app too.

The ‘Share’ icon that sits in the middle of the menu is obviously the way to publish your own masterpiece. Tapping ‘Share’ allows you to record something completely new using the iPhone or iPod Touch camera (also works with iPad 2, although not natively) or select an earlier recording from your devices internal storage.

Next you can if you wish add an effect to tint the colour of the video, change it to black and white or select one of the other options from a fairly limited selection. You can also add music, however the track is set by the video effect and there is no way to choose another musical selection without changing the overall visual effect as well. A slider adjusts the effect intensity and another the volume of the music balanced with the already recorded audio track. There is no easy way to preview the music, so it’s a case of rendering the video and waiting for it to complete. Due to the limited selections on offer, the chances are that many other videos will feature exactly the same effects and music as your own – although you don’t have to add anything on top of your video if this doesn’t appeal to you.

You can share your submissions to other Viddy users who congregate through various mobile platforms, as well as utilising services including Facebook and Twitter – although this only provides a link to the video and no way to interact with it. For this ability they will need the Viddy app – as even the website doesn’t allow you to ‘like’ or comment on videos.

My main concern is the obvious abuse of the service, which certainly isn’t of course unique to Viddy, but video opens up all kinds of opportunities for less than respectable human beings. Even visiting the official Viddy website I was presented with a woman performing a sexual act on a man as one of the (no doubt random) examples of Viddy ‘in action’. Certainly this is a glaring failure and if this kind of thing can appear on the front page of their website, it doesn’t bode very well for the app itself.

Conclusion

Viddy attempts so very hard to draw you into a world of 15 second video clips, but the sad truth is not much can actually be achieved with such a short window of opportunity. Add on to this the fact that the app itself is slightly lacking in clarity and the standard effects offer very little appeal.

There will be individuals that can add humour and amusement within the limitations, but adding very basic effects and musical audio that everyone will overuse will unfortunately become very tiresome.

This added to the more than evident abuse of the service, it is impossible to recommend Viddy. There is hope for Viddy becoming another valuable avenue of expression, but at this moment in time they seem to have quite an uphill struggle.

[xrr rating=2/5]

iTunes App Store Link: Viddy