So the functionality of the app is like Reddit in that it's divided into topics/communities, but you can also follow people directly. The app is focused on _response videos_, and commentary. So you can scroll vertically through videos, and then horizontally through their responses. The app features fullscreen video like tik tok, and also instagram style dimensions when you're not in vertical or horizontal fullscreen.
The other main feature is called clipping, which allows you to post two videos, one < 2 minute clip, and then a longer video, which is a response to the clip. The point of clipping is to do commentary yourself; ie. I could take a 2 min clip I found interesting on CNBC and then post my thoughts on it. Clipping can also be used in chains, so if I make a 10 minute video, my friend could clip out a 2 minute chunk he found interesting, and then respond to that in the chain, so the horizontal chain of videos would be : My video | His clip | His response.
Some small things: each video has written comments too for those who don't like video, you can close your video chain to only be visible to friends (kind of like a private subreddit), our focus niche at first is social, political, and economic commentary, the tone we're seeking on the platform is more intellectual/curious like hacker news or more academic content on youtube (at least at first but who knows), and we plan to launch in a month.
I got the idea when my friend and I were going to make an economic commentary type YouTube channel, and we wanted to go back and forth with each other on our ideas / videos, but there's really no great way to do that.
So basically our competitive advantage would not be search engine + large database of videos like YouTube, Vimeo, etc but the social network side.
