I have a confession: I don't know how to use YouTube. Not that I don't know how to upload a video, or watch one, or even embed one in a blog post. I don't know how to use YouTube to find anything I'd actually want to watch. No doubt, it's a sign of creeping middle age, but YouTube feels like an overwhelming, pulsating mass of meme-flogging, beauty tips, and banner ads. It's very much not what I want to turn to when I'm sitting on the couch at the end of a long day.

And yet YouTube is brimming with great video, as are so many other pockets of the internet. The problem is finding it. That's where a new app called N3twork comes in. Launched on Thursday, N3twork (pronounced "network") takes an approach borrowed from Pandora, Pinterest, social media, and maybe even a little bit of Tinder to filter and funnel online video in a way that makes all those moving pictures feel just a little bit more like traditional TV. It's a strategy for taming online video in a way that, at least for an oldster like myself, might make me want to kick back and say "What's on?"

>'There is amazing content out there. You’re just never going to find it.'

N3twork is the brainchild of Neil Young, not the musician but a former gaming executive who specialized in building niche games for niche audiences, rather than seeking out the all-purpose blockbuster. That sensibility is built into N3twork, which is organized around the principle of "channels"—areas of interest that tailor what you see to what you care about. "There is amazing content out there," Young says. "You're just never going to find it."

Reality Meets Revelation

Young is quick to point out that N3twork isn't there to offer up the obvious stuff. The app isn't competing with Game of Thrones or the NFL. It's there to find all those other endless hours of video that don't come through the traditional channels, whether those be cable or Netflix. This approach, Young says, is equal parts reality and revelation.

The reality is that a small startup can't afford to acquire the rights to mainstream Hollywood content or professional sports. The revelation, he says, is how much good content exists that goes relatively unwatched. He says N3twork is focused on the "fat middle," the niche channels that occupy so much of basic cable's bandwidth, but that aren't nearly as finely tuned as Young says N3twork's algorithms allow its app to be.

Neil Young, N3twork co-founder and CEO N3twork

When you launch N3twork for the first time, the app asks you to select areas of broad interest—sports, business, technology, food, and so on. The app then displays a video in the main viewer from one of those channels, typically pegged to a narrower channel—displayed in the app as a hashtag—within the broader category, such as "photography" within "art and design." For each video, users swipe left to skip, swipe right to save for later, or tap to watch. (Tipping the phone to landscape view also auto-plays the video.) Over time, N3twork learns your viewing, saving, and skipping habits to more narrowly personalize its offerings to your tastes.

The videos N3twork serves up find their way to your eyeballs through a collaborative mix of machine and human intelligence. Young says the service right now is indexing about 1,000 hours of video a day from about 6,500 different online sources, ranging from specific YouTube channels to the BBC and Bloomberg. Its algorithms look for external cues to tag the videos in basic categories before human curators go through to refine them to specific channels. This seeding process is necessary at least until N3twork's user base reaches a critical mass where users are adding and tagging enough of their own video finds to leverage the wisdom of the crowd.

Young believes the original sites where these videos appeared won't object to N3twork's embedding because it doesn't strip out whatever advertising was already built in. Users can also upload their own self-generated content and tag it to channels, which can be as broad or as narrow as desired, since there's no logistical limit on channels. A single video could be tagged to cars, sports cars, and Lamborghinis, for example. And as with YouTube, there's nothing stopping someone from creating a channel that's exclusively videos of their cats or kids. You just won't ever have to sift through them unless you've already sent a signal that tells N3twork you're interested.

Always in Motion

Ironically, N3twork's calming effect on internet video is accomplished through an interface that sounds totally frenetic. I've never seen an app before in which nearly everything is always in motion. When videos are indexed, N3twork's own servers pull out a 10-second excerpt used for every video in every stream in the app. Even the small "My Channel" and "Watch Later" buttons have small preview videos running below the text. But instead of feeling busy, the effect is elegant. Rather than a still frame with a big, clunky "play" triangle in the middle, N3twork serves little morsels of video, just enough of a taste for viewers to say "I'm interested" or "skip it."

It also goes without saying at this point that N3twork is available on multiple screens. While the app is designed with the idea that the smartphone is most users' de facto first screen, it runs on tablets as well. (The initial launch is iOS only.) It also undergoes an ingenious transformation when the app is mirrored from the phone via Airplay to bona fide televisions. Instead of looking like a giant version of the app, the interface changes to a big-screen-friendly, browsable carousel for which the phone becomes a remote.

Mirroring N3twork to a flatscreen via Airplay transforms the interface. N3twork

As with every other kind of online content, it's possible that social media has eliminated for good the usefulness of any kind of "front page." Maybe what our friends are watching and sharing will dictate more than anyone else what we want to watch. N3twork has a similar social option. You can follow and be followed by other users. But as with regular TV, N3twork offers a more serendipitous kind of channel surfing. Just like you don't depend solely on your Facebook friends to decide what you want to watch on Netflix or HBO, N3twork lets you browse and find content from outside your social echo chamber.

Because of the theoretically infinite bandwidth of the internet compared to cable, the app-ified version of television lacks the traditional barriers that have forced the medium into the traditional genres that have existed for so long that they seem like a given. N3twork breaks TV out of those boxes and presents a much more flexible version of what the medium could be. At least for those of us who grew up before YouTube, N3twork feels like an approachable way to make at least a little bit of those centuries of video now available online finally watchable.