Advances in technology over the past few years has made access to video (both creation and consumption) as simple as pulling your smartphone out of your pocket. And with those advances come a whole crop of video sharing apps, not least of which is a new video battle app called Clashem.
Launching out of the Red Bull Media House, Clashem pairs two videos (which may have absolutely nothing to do with each other) and asks the user to pick a winner and a loser. With UI mechanics similar to Tinder, users swipe right on the video they like and the other automatically falls off to the left.
The videos are no longer than five seconds long, and the beta is chock full of pro skaters, extreme sports enthusiasts, etc., so you can expect the first few Clashem battles that you see to be high energy.
The videos paired in each battle are selected at random, so it’s just as likely that you’ll see a dude bouncing off of a trampoline alongside a dog paragliding as it is that you’ll see two skaters duking it out.
Each video has its own statistics page, viewable by both the video creator and other users, that show how many times the video has been to battle and its win ratio.
Users can also favorite videos to save in their own profile to watch at a later date.
User profiles include the number of videos they’ve uploaded as well as their win ratio in battle, and users have the option to connect their other accounts (like Instagram, Vine, Vimeo, YouTube, etc.) to build their fan base elsewhere. That said, Clashem doesn’t let you push out Clashem content to other social networks.
There is no camera within the app, but rather the user can offer up access to the camera roll to upload already existing content, trim it to five seconds, and send it off to battle.
To keep tabs on the best of the best, the Clashem app also has its own set of leaderboards, including a global leaderboard, a following leaderboard (for the folks who are your friends on other social networks or in your address book) and a staff picks leaderboard.
The Tinder format (swipe right for yes and left for no) has been adopted by a number of different verticals. And with that adoption, something has become clear. Gamified dating may be an amazing time-sink for most of us (a hot or not for the mobile era, if you will) but it has potentially brought down the value of a romantic match.
When human suitors are replaced with sick videos, the format makes even more sense: users are addicted to swiping right and left without potentially damaging the goals of other users (who, in the case of Tinder, might be looking for an actual date instead of a fun way to kill time).
Clashem is launching out of beta today and is available on the App Store.
