No matter how you pronounce it, the GIF image file format has forever changed the way we communicate on the Internet. We use animated GIFs to express our feelings, make each other laugh, and share the antics of those silly cats and dogs.
Next, GIFs are going to try to change the way we watch television.
GIFs aren't exactly a lean-back experience like watching a baseball game or streaming a sitcom. But that's changing, as full-screen GIF-shuffling generators begin to show up on the scene. These services let you just kick back and watch a steady stream of animated GIFs play automatically, forever and ever and ever. It's like electronic ADD.
Giphy TV launched a while ago, and it's basically like watching TV when your dad won't chill out with the damn remote. A steady stream of curated GIFs looping and rapid-firing into your eyeballs. And today, Tumblr has launched its own similar product. It's called Tumblr TV, and it's basically the same thing with a bit more customization.
"The GIF is really an old standard that dates back to the '80s," says Tumblr project engineer Bill Eager. "It was a conceptually challenging exercise to present GIFs in a fresh way... GIFs can be large files and render slowly. We have a sophisticated search product already, so it was easy to get the Tumblr TV content right once we nailed down the experience."
Tumblr's spin on the idea includes GIF programming driven by search queries. After running a search for "my dinner with andre gifs" or "credit card fraud gifs" or whatever you might want, a new button appears next to the most-popular results from the search. You click a TV button, the GIFs scale to fill your entire browser window, and it starts blasting out animated image after animated image. You can also switch up your search terms while it's in TV mode.
Pressing a pause button lets you just watch a single looping GIF over and over, and there are also skip-ahead and skip-back buttons. The Tumblr TV console also lets you like and reblog each GIF if your mouse finger is fast enough. (For a more Giphy-like experience, you can fire up tumblr.com/tv for a random assortment of GIFs.)
For now, this is just part of Tumblr's desktop experience, although the company says it is working on a mobile version of Tumblr TV for smaller screens. This first iteration was a few months in the making.
"This started as a prototype about three months ago, but the idea gained a lot of traction once we put it on the overhead monitors around the office," Eager says. "We capitalized on that energy and hustled to turn Tumblr TV into a reality for our users."
So we've gone from network TV to cable TV to streaming video to watching big old GIFs flip in front of our faces like we're sitting on the remote control. Your move, cable companies.
