Amplium is a dedicated destination for immersive video on the Apple Vision Pro, alongside Apple TV, with a curated mix ranging from short immersive documentaries to music experiences.
Individual immersive experiences can be difficult for headset owners to find unless there is a strong campaign behind them, or they are easy to spot inside apps that people are already browsing. For smaller immersive studios, being featured by Apple in the App Store or Apple TV app can offer a temporary lift in views before other content is rotated in to be promoted, but without internal or external discoverability support beyond that, studios often struggle to get their content seen.
There is some great narrative immersive content out there and Amplium offers a way to make it easier for Apple Vision Pro owners to discover more of it once they download the app.
Helping More Immersive Video Become Discoverable
Amplium is currently home to just over 10 immersive video experiences, each of them free to watch, and more titles are actively being added from studio partners. The app itself is also free to download.
Hibiki Sato, Co-Founder & CEO of Amplium, shares that their focus is to help to make it easier for the studios behind immersive video content to “encode, host, and distribute it.” While all content is free for now, there will be paid content added soon. “Since the market is still very new, the priority for our current creators has been reach and feedback, getting their work in front of a wider audience …rather than charging for it right away.”
Right now, Amplium is focused on work that benefits from the visual fidelity and spatial audio possible for immersive video on Apple Vision Pro.
Sato shares “We only work with content shot on the Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive, run it through our own encoding pipeline, and play it back in our own player. Owning the whole chain, from source to playback, means each piece looks as close to the creator’s original as possible.” Amplium also intends to integrate live immersive streaming “as the Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive 100G arrives.” That focus on visual and audio fidelity gives Amplium a sense of consistency across the catalog, even as the types of experiences and directing styles vary.
The Curated Mix Makes Amplium Worth Visiting
The best reason to get Amplium is the variety of types of experiences that it is adding, some extremely different from what you may find in Apple TV. Amplium is not confined to a certain type of content like a platform like Apple TV may be. The current catalog already ranges from short thrilling documentaries to more experimental immersive experiences.
There are some immersive videos on there that got me so excited because of the quality of direction in which the creators clearly consider how it feels to visit each live-captured story, and subtle elements that can make the virtual visits feel more real. For example, Shibuya Freefall by Chiaki Mayumura from NHK Technologies is an enjoyable music video experience that takes you to some incredible city views as well as a fun, colorful dance performance. KICK from altitude.101 takes you to the French Alps so you can get a glimpse into what it’s like for freeriders up there, and enjoy the views and sounds of everything from the sunrise to their daring ski jumps.
More content including sport-related immersive videos is coming such as a short documentary that follows an athlete during the Ironman. Amplium is also producing immersive video for the app, starting with an experience featuring Japanese football legend Keisuke Honda alongside other national team stars.
A Simple Interface Keeps The Focus On The Experiences
Amplium is intuitive to use. Simply scroll through the available videos to select what you would like to experience. As with other immersive video on Apple Vision Pro, you can also easily pause, rewind, fast forward, jump between scenes and adjust the audio while watching.
As more titles are added, along with paid experiences, the browsing experience could benefit from more structure to ensure content is still simple to browse and discover, based on interests. And if Amplium chooses to add features like categories for genres, and the ability to search across a growing catalog, this could give them more insight into what viewers are looking for to help inform what content to add next.
Amplium integrates Sign in with Apple, making sign-in easy for users and also empowering them with the ability to personalize the user experience as they learn more about individual behaviors. This also gives Amplium a way to send email updates based on users’ interests, alerting them to immersive videos they may not have discovered yet.
