Today, we announce to take the Tweek App offline.
From day 1, Tweek has been about connecting people to video. Tweek was designed as a new entry door to future video consumption: One Personalised Video Discovery across hundreds of Apps + Websites to serve everybody with nothing less than the personally & contextually most relevant content.
Tweek aims to solve two major consumer problems we all know when leaning back on the couch in the evening to watch video:
What’s worth my time?
Where can I get it now? 
We wanted to build a product as simple as TV (press 1 button and it works) and as intelligent as the web. Today, this vision is clear and crisp but it was not in October 2010 when we started.
Netflix was still a mail delivery (remember?) and streaming service in parallel at that time. European Broadcasters had first & little time shifting/ catchup offerings and media companies established VoD offerings which were mainly driven by marketing and without user experience or deep tech knowledge in mind.
The market and especially the consumer feedback towards Tweek was very positive and pushed us to work even harder. People mainly loved the groundbreaking design approach of our first design by Frank and also the idea of putting content at the center and annotating it with meta data, related friends interactions, community features and link to VoD services incl. price and quality comparison around it. Nonetheless, Tweek also faced three main shortcomings:
Deep linking
Deep linking was a big user experience shortcoming on mobile before major internet companies such as Facebook decided to fix it. Tweek was one of the first services, trying to bridge App silos and connect users into 3rd party App offering, directly. Depending on content rights, you could end up watching the content in Tweek (Youtube + arte), within an embedded web view (ARD, ZDF, Pro7Sat1 catchup) within the iTunes Store (iTunes content or App downloads) or within a 3rd party app (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Maxdome …) This let to a cluttered, non-unified user experience.
Business Case
The main business case of the Tweek App is lead generation. Mobile platforms were not ready for this in 2012/13. Tracking system were either not installed or ended within the AppStore. Web enabled landing pages of Video on Demand services were not mobile optimised. Many conversion killers remained.
Target group
We included live tv schedules to target users who grew up with linear television in addition to our core, millennial target group. We figured along the way that the feature set for those 2 groups has to be different and we constantly struggled to fullfill both needs in parallel. Today, we are sure to split the service by target group. You can not transfer users between those mental models of TV and video. TV will die with those who grew up with it and video is slowly but surely take over — eyeballs and eventually ad dollars.
Today, we announce to take down the current version. We haven’t updated the code since September 2013 and right now, we still see it as an adorable product but quality is not where it has to be. Our quality benchmark has always been stellar and Tweek App is not, anymore. Simply, performance of 20 months old code can not be where we want to see it. Even though bug rates have been low, maintenance costs are increasing and Tweek App needs more than a facelift — performance and concept wise.
We are very much looking forward to build the next version. While most us focus on our API product, right now, a small group works on the next generation Tweek. Prototypes are running, already. It will be very different from prior versions but the vision is still very much alive.
Thanks to all who were part of this ride so far ❤️
Team Tweek
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We are looking for an experienced and communicative backend engineer with the ambition to take the next step and become the Technical Team Lead of a startup in the merging space of social media and video discovery. Sounds interesting?
Role
- Lead the architecture and the development of our Ruby based platform
- Develop innovative solutions based on product requirements and business challenges
- Lead and manage the engineering process according to business requirements
- Elaborate and decide on architectural challenges and operational issues
- Translate requirements into actionable tasks
- Help to grow our technology capabilities and support recruiting of top talent
Who we are looking for:
- You have been developing in Ruby/Rails for 3+ years - but are generally not married to any language for philosophical reasons
- You have great communication skills paired with the ability to lead teams
- You have strong technical skills including a deep understanding of data structures and state of the art APIs
- You design and build beautiful systems that are simple and scale
- You are more pragmatic than idealistic when it comes to software development
- You know how to compromise and strike the right balance between a perfect solution and delivery on time
- You have an EU work permit
A Plus
- Previous startup and team lead/lead architect experience
- Experience with recommendation systems, named entity recognition solutions or front-end development
- Active contributor to open source software or active member of the development community
You got it all?
Great! Kick off the conversation by sending us your CV and examples of your work. Send your Email to jobs@tweek.tv.
Das Video-Discovery-Startup Tweek hat seinen Fokus von Endanwendern zu Medien-, Hardware- und Kabelanbietern verlagert. Diese versorgt es mit der Technologie, um Zuschauer mit für sie relevanten Inhalten zu beliefern. Die Fragmentierung des Markets kommt den Berlinern entgegen.
Tweek-Gründer Marcel Düe hat mit Netzwertig über aktuelle Unternehmenspläne und die Zukunft der Video Discovery gesprochen.
Hier geht’s zum vollständigen Artikel.
Once in a while, you just have to get out of the city for a healthy portion of nature, deliberating boat trips and some quality time with your amazing team mates…
