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Create your own video carousel on your iPad with Vodio

Vodio is a slick and free iPad app that lets you create custom channels of your favorite topics of Internet video.

Matt Elliott Senior Editor

Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.

Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms

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Matt Elliott

July 18, 2012 12:17 p.m. PT

2 min read

Vodio is a great time waster. It's a free iPad app that lets you create custom video channels that you can easily swipe through. Here's how it works.

When you first launch the app, you'll be greeted by a screen of 12 colorful tiles. Tap on up to five of these tiles to select your topics of interest. Tap Next and Vodio will load your channels plus a Hot 100 channel and a Connect channel. Swipe horizontally to browse through the carousel of channels, and swipe vertically on the centered channel to browse its videos.

Tap on a video to play it. In the play window, you can swipe from the right edge of the screen to view more thumbnails of that channel. A handy + button lets you queue up videos to watch later. When you first tap a video to watch later, Vodio creates a Watch Later channel. Any type of search functionality, however, is missing.

On the Connect channel, you can link to your Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube accounts. I signed up with two different YouTube accounts, but both times the newly created YouTube channel for my videos failed to populate with any of my videos.

With no search, you are at the mercy of Vodio to deliver content in your chosen areas. For me, it was more miss than hit, but thankfully you can add more narrowly focused channels to your Vodio carousel by tapping the + button when viewing your Vodio carousel. This brings up a list of your channels. Tap on a channel to view subtopics. For example, under Tech you can create channels such as Mobile Apps, Apple News, Gadgets, and so on. Each subtopic gets added as its own channel to your carousel. Also, the broad topic area itself (in this example, Tech) is listed at the top of the list of subtopics, which you can tap to remove that channel from your carousel.

One last note: continuous play is enabled by default. If you don't want one video beginning as soon as another ends, tap the gear icon in the upper-right corner to access settings, tap Preferences, and then tap the slider for "Continuous Play enabled" to turn it off.

(Via AppAdvice)