Viddy, Once Touted As ‘The Instagram For Video’, Will Shut Down On December 15

Remember Viddy? The one-time red hot mobile video app is closing down. That’s according to Fullscreen, the company that bought it for $20 million — a snip of its peak valuation — earlier this year.

A post on the Viddy blog — first spotted by App Advice — explains that the Viddy app was removed from the App Store and Google Play on November 4. Anyone who already installed either app has until December 15 to use it, after which the service will officially shut down. Those wishing to keep their videos can do so using the exporter tool on Viddy.com before the final shutoff date.

The announcement of Viddy’s winding down comes one year to the day that the company rebranded to Supernova and launched slow motion video-sharing app Epic and ephemeral group messaging app Clique. These other two services will also close down so that Fullscreen can “focus singularly on building the best consumer experience for the Fullscreen audience.”

What might that be? Well, the blog post promises that Fullscreen will announce a new service in 2015, details of which it is not sharing at this point.

IMG_4001At the height of its popularity, Viddy claimed 50 million users and was reportedly clocking 500,000 new registrations per day. The company raised $30 million in May 2012, when it was largely heralded as ‘The Instagram For Video’ — a string of celebrities, even Mark Zuckerberg, were using it.

But, easy come, easy go, as they say. The service lost large amounts of traffic following a change to Facebook’s highly-influential algorithm.

The knock-on effect of that saw Viddy lay off one-third of its team and recapitalize its business, returning $18 million of its big funding round to investors.

The release of Twitter’s Vine app in early 2013, which was followed by the actual launch of video on Instagramdidn’t help its cause either.

Viddy reportedly rejected an acquisition offer from Twitter, which promptly went away and bought Vine. Socialcam, another early mobile video mover, did get an exit, selling to Autodesk in an unexpected $60 million deal in the summer of 2012.

Today’s news will be of little surprise to anyone who has followed the mobile video space. But, even still, I’ll pour a small one out for the memories — thanks and goodbye, Viddy.

Viddy screenshot via Flickr user Miquel C. reproduced under a Creative Commons 2.0 license