Reelr.TV – Discover Your Inner TweeJ

Reelr.tv is another contender in the growing arena of streaming music services like Chill featuring freely embeddable music videos. Originally launched as MTweeV.com, MTV nixed that move even though they aren't really associated with music videos anymore, and so Reelr.tv was born, leveraging the combined power of Twitter and YouTube.

The basic concept of Reelr.tv is that you tweet a song title and include the hashtag #nowPlaying and they automatically create your channel at http://Reelr.tv/yourTwitterUserName. It's fast, at least at 5 am ET. Without creating an account on Reelr.tv, I posted the hashtag and the title, "Can't Tell Me Nothing", and within 5 seconds I checked for the channel and there was Kanye's video, ready to go! I have to admit, this was one of those moments when I was reminded that the Internet can still seem magical.

Reelr.tv has a flexible approach. If you set up an account, you can create your own custom hashtag. But you don't have to have an account or login at all to check out videos and you're not actually required to focus on music videos. Like most of the current YouTube-based offerings I'm seeing, the music video idea is the marketing focus but you can post any videos you wish.

The site is organized around tweej's, cities (i.e. location of tweets), curated playlists or searches by artist, record or song from which you can create playlists on the fly.

And if you can't stand to do anything that's not monetized, you can upload ads to YouTube and include them in your feed.

The only thing it doesn't have that most related services include is an interactive chat feature which isn't an issue for me but might be for other folks.

Reelr.tv is rather elegant in its simplicity with enough features to satisfy divergent approaches without complicating matters. That's hard to do and I'm suitably impressed.

Hypebot contributor Clyde Smith is a freelance writer and blogger. He is currently relaunching Flux Research to pursue his long-standing obsession with web business models. To suggest music services and related topics for review at Hypebot, please contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.