Personalized Music Video Service Cull TV Acquired By Twitvid, CEO Departs

Social video network Twitvid has closed another acquisition today, following its March deal which involved bringing the team from daily deals aggregator Frugalo on board. Today, the company is announcing it has acquired Cull TV, an independent music video sharing site, which CTO John Hurliman describes as a little bit like Pandora mixed with MTV.

Cull TV, founded in early 2011, currently offers a catalog of some 2 to 3 million videos, with 100 brand-new ones appearing per day. The service offers 25 prominent channels devoted to various genres, but gets more specific than just “indie rock” or “hip hop.” Some of the featured channels today, for example, include “Euro Popped,” and “New Chilean Rock,” to give you an idea of how niche some of the content can be.

The company relies on its in-house team of experts to curate the selections to determine what’s trending, but it also relies on the wider web of music bloggers, Hurliman explains. There’s other technology behind the site, too, which involves “a lot of web analysis and continuous crawling” to find out which bands and videos are generally popular. And Cull TV can customize channels to your own interests as well.

“Once you log in with Facebook on the site,” adds Hurliman, “we can get a lot more personalized intelligence by looking at your Facebook posts and your Facebook likes to determine what bands you like and turn those into continuous video playlists,” he says.

As for Twitvid’s interest in the site, it goes far beyond curating music videos. Explains Twitvid CEO Mo Al Adham, “we’re going to use a lot of the know-how and knowledge the [Cull TV] team has acquired to integrate those learnings into Twitvid,” he says.

Cull TV did a lot of work in figuring out how to get really great content out of long tail video, and knows how to use a combination of manual curation and algorithms to surface the most relevant content.

“We hope to bring what we did very well in independent music, and broaden that out to Twitvid’s more generic approach to all of long-tail video,” Hurliman says.

During the transition period, Cull TV will remain up-and-running for at least the next few months, but whether it will remain up indefinitely has yet to be determined. Also of note, Cull TV CEO Katherine de León will not be joining the Twitvid team, but will be moving on to a new project.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but the results of the integration will arrive soon after Twitvid’s big product announcement they’re teasing for June (hopefully a new iPad experience).

According to CEO Al Adham, Twitvid has more than doubled the number of video views it serves over the past five to six months, now in the range of 70 million+ views. The last time they talked to press, the Twitvid network was seeing 10 million unique visitors. Today, that’s over 15 million. Stay tuned.