Animoto has made a big update to its iPhone app, which reduces the number of steps it takes to create videos. With the simplified workflow, Animoto hopes even more users will start taking advantage of its tool.
The startup has been around for a while, first on the web and now on mobile. When it first launched, automatically creating beautiful slideshows out of images was a novel thing, something that users could share with family and friends. At some point, they added video, but really that meant offering a way for users to upload videos recorded on their flip phones, which was also novel, but also kind of a pain in the ass.
And then smartphones came along, and that changed everything.
Once users could easily take photos and record videos and share them with friends, Animoto jumped on the mobile train. It did that with an app that replicated the online process of automatically mashing together different photos and videos, adding themes and music and making them generally nice to look at.
Just one problem — that online process wasn’t as easy as it could have been for mobile users. And so Animoto went back to the drawing board.
The result is a totally simplified workflow for creating Animoto videos. Whereas it took 20 clicks in the old app to get through the process, it now takes just four steps to go from start to finish. That includes picking your photos and videos, choosing a style and music, and customizing the video with text and metadata. Oh, then there’s the preview page for checking out what your video looks like before finalizing it.
While Animoto has simplified the workflow, it still provides ways for users to customize their videos during the preview process. They can do that by pulling back the preview screen, which will open up to allow them to customize the order of media objects in the video, add or delete them.
For Animoto, the goal is to get users to create more videos, which in turn gets more people engaged, which creates more paying customers, which makes everyone happy. The company operates on a freemium model, in which users can create videos up to 30 seconds in length for free, but have to pay for longer videos or more customizable features. It’s either $5 a month or $30 a year to take advantage of those features.
The new mobile app comes as Animoto has been sprucing up its image lately — peep the new logo! — and trying to increase consumer adoption. The company has had 1 million downloads of its iOS app, and now has more than 7 million registered users across web and mobile.
Thanks to a couple of tweaks it made to the iPhone app in recent months, it’s seen the number of videos created on that platform double from January to May. But it’s hoping that this big overhaul of the app will accelerate things even further.