Voxy is a new way to help users to talk about movies and shows with their family, friends and other people to find interesting shows to watch.
Users post their interesting shows, then their friends can comment and discuss the themes and incidents they liked in the movie or show. It’s also a great way to get recommendations before one watches a movie or show.
“Next time you’re ready to watch something just check Voxy. It will also notify you when new episodes of your favourite shows are about to air, show you trailers, cast information, show you the latest movies and shows and a lot more,” Ian Wambai, the app’s developer told TechMoran.
“It can be pretty frustrating trying to find what to watch next,” he said. “Sometimes I’d spend about 30 minutes looking for a show to watch before actually settling on something, then 20 minutes into it I’d realise that I don’ t like it. I figured the best recommendations came from my friends, because they’ve already watched it, and it turns out a lot of people have the same issue, so I decided to make an app to make it easier for groups of people to talk about and recommend movies to each other.”
The app is currently in an open beta, so anyone can download the app and join the community. It’s completely free, and has no advertising. Mr. Wambai says at the moment it’s more important for Voxy to build a great community than to monetize, so that’ll come later.
With no direct competition in the market as people get recommendations by word of mouth or Twitter, Wambai says Voxy is a much more focused and convenient way to do that.
The app has both movies and TV shows and users can search for and find pretty much any movie or show in existence, whether it came out 50 years ago or last week. They can also post about and talk about specific seasons or entire shows.
Talking about his failed startup, Mr. Wambai says creating a “blockchain startup” sounds great, but consumers don’t really care about what powers your technology unless it’s uniquely useful for them.
“As we built out Byt it became more and more similar to a blockchain version of M-Pesa and would have required infrastructure we couldn’t get at the time, so unfortunately Byt had to shut down,” he told TechMoran.
Unlike Byt which needed massive infrastructure, Wambai says Voxy is different.
“With Voxy, I’m building a community where after you watch a movie or TV show, it’s just really natural and intuitive for you to post about it and share your thoughts, just like you would on Twitter or Facebook. Whenever you have time to watch something you’ll also check Voxy to see what’s on your watchlist,” he said.
Voxy sees that user feedback is extremely important especially during the open beta. A lot of the features added and changes made have come directly from user suggestions. The date for the full release hasn’t been set yet, but Voxy is making really great progress and everyone is invited to download and try it out.
Wambai is also happy about the recent M-Pesa-PayPal partnership. To him “it’s a great step forward for Kenyans who regularly use PayPal to make and receive online payments, but I think that it needs more work, and needs to become much easier to use for it to have a larger impact.”
