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Turner’s Super Deluxe Is Building a Video and Gif Aggregation Site (Exclusive)

Super Deluxe
Courtesy of Super Deluxe

Turner Broadcasting’s digital media venture Super Deluxe is getting ready to branch out beyond content production: The Super Deluxe team has quietly been working on a media aggregation site called Surf.co, Variety has learned.

Super Deluxe hasn’t publicly announced or launched Surf.co yet, and is only briefly referencing the project on its site without offering up any further specifics. A Turner spokesperson declined to comment when contacted for this story.

However, Variety was able to take a peek at a publicly accessible staging website that shows off what may be an early iteration of the site.

In its current form, Surf.co allows users to manually collect videos from YouTube, Facebook and elsewhere and organize them in collections, or boards, as they’re called on the site. The same can be done with Gifs, tweets or other forms of online media.

Surf.co doesn’t embed any of these finds, but simply links to YouTube and elsewhere for media consumption. In that way, it’s similar to other social link aggregation sites, with one interesting twist: Users can also connect to third-party services to automatically populate their boards with new content. Surf.co currently taps into Reddit, SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube and Giphy to automatically load new content.

This makes it possible to, for example, build a continuously updated collection with the newest releases of an artist on SoundCloud, or with the top videos posted to Reddit. Users can also add any podcast, and there are apparently plans to integrate with the bookmarking service Pocket as well.

Turner originally used the Super Deluxe brand for a comedy video hub in 2007, but folded the venture into Adult Swim less than two years later. Last October, the network resurrected Super Deluxe as a kind of incubator for online media.

The Super Deluxe team has since produced some original content for Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter, with the goal being to produce “funny and smart videos from funny and smart weirdos who are probably a lot like you,” according to the Super Deluxe website, which also promises “shorts, series, animations and a smattering of documentaries and music. Plus apps, sites and games.”

Surf.co seems to fall in the latter category, and it looks like Super Deluxe also plans to use the site to promote some of its own content. Not only does the site already feature a board with Super Deluxe videos, there’s also a section for special edition celebrity boards, currently featuring a collection curated by comedian and Comedy Central TV on-screen talent Brandon Wardell.