Hipplay: The Most Game-Changing Social Media App, Ever

Hippplay is an app it took me a awhile to sit and focus and blog about, but for good reason: I my original intent was to have this full-blown blog and vlog presentation with all of my Hipplay-related videos, including the 11-minute presentation that I was given at Cosmopolitan LV on the Thursday night of CES 2014 Las Vegas. But time and content demands were such that I figured I’d start with this post, and go from there.

It was that presentation which blew me away. Hipplay is a dangerous, game-changing app that holds great implications for legal issues in the sharing of social media content. Yes, it’s that powerful.

But what is the Hipplay app?

The makers describe Hipplay in this way, from the press release: “the world’s first cross-platform media aggregator that gives iOS and Android users a whole new way to instantly access, view and share their entire collection of digital photos, videos and music stored virtually anywhere, all from a single, free app.

The first universal media management system of its kind, Hipplay™ tears down storage silos and consolidates scattered digital content into a single interface, giving users ubiquitous, one-touch access to all of their memories and music stored on:
Social sites, like Facebook and Twitter, including both your own photos and videos as well as those others have posted with you.

Local storage on any linked PC, Mac or mobile device, including iPhone, iPad and even Android phones and tablets—regardless of whether the device is powered on,
Cloud storage, with access to photos, videos and music on Dropbox, SkyDrive and GoogleDrive, and Home networks through compatible Routers and Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices by Linksys, LaCie, Netgear, Seagate, Medion and more.

In addition to one-touch ubiquitous access to all of your digital media, hipplay™ also enables users to:

Edit photos directly within the app;
Share photos and videos instantly via Facebook, Twitter or email;
Stream virtually any video format on iOS, without having to download and decode it first, with the first built-in decoder that unlocks the proprietary format limitation on iOS devices for over the internet video streaming in real time;
Connect to Google TV set top boxes and Smart TVs that are hipplay™ Ready and view media from your collection on the big screen anywhere; and
Connect to home media stored on hipplay™- ready routers and home gateways coming pre-installed on select new devices in 2014.

“How many times have you wanted to show a photo or video to a friend and realized it’s not on your phone?

I put those last words in bold for a reason. And it’s because Hipplay might not catch your fancy just because you can gather all of your social media crap into one place. But then, when I was told I could send the result to others via one simple link, and that there may be a way (well, there is a way) to convert that link into something that could be used in a tweet, I flipped.

See, Hipplay is the modern, app version of web entrepreneur Mary Hodder’s Dabble.com. Dabble was this cool web application Mary introduced at Vloggercon in 2007, and where I met her. It was such that you could collect the content of every webpage you visited. It was a cool way of picking off text, colors, photos and videos you wanted, and perhaps wanted to use for other purposes. Sadly, Dabble came to an end because Mary had a shitty relationship with the server host, who (I was told by some friends) had jacked up the price on her, and shut her down. (As a momentary aside, bad sever hosts have been the bane of the existence of the applications of many a web and mobile entrepreneur.)

But I digress.

Hipplay basically allows you to do the same thing but for social media sites. However, while it’s producers mention that you can bring together your own content that’s spread between, say, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, the fact is that Hipplay doesn’t limit you to your own content; you can grab any fucking thing you see.

Then you can take that collection of, say, videos and photos of Mic Jagger, and send it out to creation via Twitter. Or you can take videos and photos of your ex-girlfriend cheating on you with various men while you were dating, and send that out via Twitter or mentioning it, with a link, in a blog post.

Or you can grab all of the social media information on a new car your promoting, and use it as part of an online marketing effort.

The list of possibilities goes on and on.

Hipplay has the chance to usher in a new type of time-wasting activity: media gathering. We do it to a degree, already, but Hipplay makes it push button easy to do with your phone.

Hipplay is for iOS and Android and is to be be available for public download in Q1/2014 from the Apple App Store and the GooglePlay store. Each Hipplay account comes with 5GB of free cloud storage to speed up always on access or use as content backup. In-app upgrades offer the ability to add an unlimited number of cloud storage accounts, wide video decoding support and 250GB of cloud storage.

Download it and give it a spin.

Who Makes Hipplay?

The Hipplay main team of about 8 people is lead by Marc-Antoine Benglia, its CEO, and the primary financial front person for the company right now. Hipplay, in turn, is part of Axentra Corporation out of Ottowa, Canada. Before joining Axentra’s executive team in the spring of 2003, Marc-Antoine served as Chairman and President of Hemera Technologies Inc.

Stay tuned.