This year, video discovery service FFWD is trying to make a splash with an aggregation of videos from the event organized using the company’s channel surfing concept.
The site itself is pretty simple: a video player with a “next” button to keep surfing videos. The videos are pulled from both the SXSW YouTube account and from Twitter, by looking at tweets about the conference and decoding shortened URLs to find the videos. Beyond SXSW, FFWD has launched Twitmatic, an ongoing stream of videos shared on Twitter that uses the same setup.
As for how this fits into FFWD’s broader plan, it’s easy to imagine how Tweets might be used within the service. As an aggregator of videos from YouTube, Hulu, and numerous other sites, FFWD’s concept is to get smarter as you use it, and in turn, showing you videos you’ll enjoy more each time you hit the “Fast Forward” button in the player.