Social video sharing service Shelby.tv today announced via blog post that it would be closing down its service over the weekend. The company said that it’s going to ground in order to vastly improve things on the backend and come back stronger than ever. It’s rare for a company to completely shut its doors while working on something new, and for good reason; what’s to say there’ll be users around to see what you’ve built when you turn the lights back on?
Shelby founder and CEO Reece Pacheco thinks so, and he’s prepared to invest considerable resources to back that up. In a brief interview, he told BetaKit that what’s behind the closure is a desire on Shelby.tv’s part to be better at what they’re doing.
“It essentially comes down to us knowing that we could do a better job of processing social feeds for video, opening up discovery of new content, and enabling community to grow around that,” he said. “When we looked at how we wanted to do it, we realized doing it right meant an entirely new architecture and so we set out to do it.”
Since Shelby.tv has such a small team with limited engineering resources, the best way to accomplish that in Pacheco’s opinion was to shut down the existing site and devote everyone’s time and attention to what’s on the horizon. Pacheco is promising a faster product with more social features and better discovery, and with a backend that’s designed to hold everything up and scale in a much more reliable fashion with the help of that focus.
Back in April, Shelby.tv added a number of features to try to increase social sharing via user-curated video collections, but the space is heating up with other entrants like Showyou aggressively pursuing a multi-platform strategy, players like Socialcam and Viddy working hard on mobile video discovery, and even newsreader app Pulse getting in on the action. Standing out in the market is a definite challenge, so a “back to the drawing board” approach might be just what the doctor ordered – provided Shelby.tv really does rise again.
