Yahoo’s closure of their Jumpcut video service feels like the slow peeling off of a bandaid. In December they announced that no new videos could be uploaded, but that they “will be keeping the Jumpcut site up and running for the foreseeable future.”
Apparently the foreseeable future ends in June, when the site will be shut down. From an email they sent out to users today:
Dear Jumpcut user,
After careful consideration, we will be officially closing the Jumpcut.com site on June 15, 2009. This was a difficult decision to make, but it’s part of the ongoing prioritization efforts at Yahoo!
Very soon, we’ll be releasing a software utility that will allow you to download the movies you created on Jumpcut to your computer. We’ll send instructions to this email address when the download utility is available.
Once you download your movies, you may choose to upload them to another site such as Flickr, which now allows video uploads. You can find out more here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/video/
Thanks for your understanding and thanks for being a part of Jumpcut.
The Jumpcut Team
Online video editing service Jumpcut, which was acquired by Yahoo! in September 2006, appears to be in the process of shutting down.
From their website:
We’re sorry to announce that we are no longer accepting uploads to Jumpcut.
We will be keeping the Jumpcut site up and running for the foreseeable future so you‘ll still be able to play, remix and share your existing movies – you just won’t be able to upload anything new.
If you’re looking for a place to upload and share your video, we recommend that you head over to Flickr: http://flickr.com/explore/video
Ever since the social video market boomed through 2006, some video services have sought to differentiate themselves by adding online editors. Jumpcut and Motionbox launched their editors last April and Jumpcut was acquired by Yahoo! 5 months later. Eyespot launched its editor a month before Jumpcut, last March. Last December Gotuit launched their SceneMaker video mashup app. Photobucket recently coming launched its own video/audio/photo editor for premium members (full release next month). Today, Cuts is launching its editor into public beta. If you’re already working with video on the web, an online editor is fast, easy and free. In theory, these services could bring video editing to people who would otherwise never engage in it. People already engaging in video editing can benefit from automatic software updates and the sharing made possible by online communities. Here’s a look at each of the services, followed by a more in depth chart comparing features. Cuts “Simple and easy, when you need edits now” Cuts is the new kid on the block and is all about remixing viral video. They don’t host content, but instead take videos from other sites (YouTube, Google, Myspace). With Cuts you can trim, loop, add preloaded sound effects, and insert captions to enhance the original. Editing is straightforward, consisting of changes to the sound, caption, and navigation levels for the video. Every edit can be re-cut, embedded, and emailed. In the future, Cuts will be expanding into simple editing for digital movies and TV shows. See also our early look at Cuts a few weeks ago. Gotuit “For slicing and dicing scenes” Gotuit Scenemaker is for slicing out scenes from videos on other networks. After importing a video into the program via URL, you can select a start and end for one or more scenes on the video, title, tag, and email the scenes to friends. Unfortunately I couldn’t use it to slice up Gotuit content. Eyespot “Mashups with effects, transitions, and titles” Eyespot is a solid editor that lets you mix together your own Motionbox content or scenes from their promotional media packs. It has a simple drag and drop interface that lets you manage a wide variety of effects and transitions for both the audio and video layers. Eyespot lets you add your own audio and mix in photos as well. While you can’t grab video from other networks, Eyespot’s white label editor is becoming available → Read More
The popularity of rich media publishing (such as podcasting and videocasting, the YouTube phenomenon, etc.) is a problem for search engines and people trying to use search engines to find this content. The problem is that the traditional ways search engines index and rank content don’t apply to rich media because, well, it’s not easily indexable. A few startups are focusing on creating transcriptions of podcasts and video content (see Pluggd and Podzinger, for example), which search engines can then index. And many people are tagging audio, video and photo content. YouTube, Flickr and others allow this (and see Google’s efforts to tag photos using humans). Tags help describe the content and are usable by search engines as well as humans. But highest level tags, when they are present, don’t capture all of the content, so a lot is missed. Figuring out how to search the meta data around rich content (tags and lots of other descriptive data) is big business. Truveo, a video search startup that launched in 2005 and was subsequently acquired by AOL for at least $50 million, helped solve this problem (but still falls woefully short of perfect). A new unlaunched startup, CastTV, takes rich media searching another few steps forward (much more on them in a later post). But even these new search companies can’t find all of the content in a video or audio file, and certainly can’t take you right to where that content is presented. That’s why I like the idea of deep tagging. It requires human labor but for many publishers it’s worth it. Instead of simply being associated with a file, a deep tag is associated with a clip from the file. Click on the tag and jump right to that part of the clip. We’ve covered a few companies that are facilitating deep tagging, such as MotionBox, JumpCut (acquired by Yahoo last week), Viddler and Click.tv. Also, Google recently added a captioning feature to video, as well as the ability to permanently link to any time spot in a clip. Veotag is doing this as well (we haven’t covered them yet but a few commenters have pointed them out in the past). Today I received an email from Howard Seibel, Veotag’s VP Marketing. He pointed me to this page which is a better version of a TalkCrunch podcast I recorded last week with Om Malik and Robert Scoble. He’s → Read More
The Yahoo! family expanded again today with the acquisition of online video editing service Jumpcut. Here’s the Jumpcut post on the announcement and here’s the Yahoo! Search post. Based in San Francisco and launched just six months ago, Jumput specializes in letting users remix videos already online or edit their own video with its interface. Mike Arrington gave the company a good review when it launched, writing that it was even better than Motionbox – a service he called the best yet for sharing online video just days before Jumpcut launched. Yahoo! Video already has one of the biggest video search indexes online and will be all the more compelling with the added ability to remix posted content and edit original video online. The terms of the deal are not being disclosed, although our guess is that Yahoo paid nowhere near the $65 million in cash that Sony recently spent to acquire Grouper, a video sharing site with a P2P focus. Wether the Jumpcut acquisition was large or small – it’s very cool. It’s one more example of the growing importance of remix culture and online video. → Read More
JumpCut, reviewed here by Michael Arrington several months ago, announced a licensing deal for its browser-based video editing software with FoxAtomic today. FoxAtomic will use Jumpcut to enable online auditions for its remake of the classic comedy “Revenge of the Nerds”. It is the second such deal for JumpCut, following a contest that allowed users to remix the trailer for “A Scanner Darkly” (which, by the way, is an excellent movie). While there is no shortage of video creation and editing in the world right now with desktop software, Jumpcut’s tool has its advantages to marketers who’d rather keep users on their sites to edit video. Whether or not users would prefer this, I don’t know. But if the browser based technology is good enough and, as discussed in last week’s Bix post, when the prizes are enticing enough, participation is bound to follow. And with participation begins a virtuous cycle for a company, in which users beget deals which beget more users which beget more deals… Two deals hardly makes JumpCut’s success a given, but seeing any site in the online video space generate some revenue is newsworthy. JumpCut’s different twist in this crowded space certainly gives it a leg up in the race to sustainability. → Read More
No sooner did I proclaim Motionbox the best online video sharing service (mostly for its editing and deep tagging tools), than a new contender arrives on the scene. San Francisco based stealth startup Jumpcut, founded by Mike Folgner and Ryan Cunningham, just launched minutes ago. In my mind there are now two distinct types of video sharing services. The first is the YouTube crowd and its dozens of clones, which allow easy uploading of files which are then transcoded into flash, and tagging of those files. The goal is to get video and page views, and it’s working. It’s working so well, in fact, that it raises questions on their business model. YouTube is free but has very real bandwidth costs from showing these videos. They are dealing with this in two ways – by degrading the quality of the flash video files to reduce file size, and by raising another $8m from Sequoia, raising the total to $11.5 million. The second group does what YouTube does, but also has some basic editing features. Included in this group is Grouper, Motionbox, Jumpcut and, to some extent, YouTube. Grouper and VideoEgg require a client download to use the service. Motionbox and Jumpcut don’t, although Jumpcut says they’ll have one as an option soon. With these last two, the editing occurs online, and therefore facilitates editing by a group on a shared video. Jumpcut, as the newest entrant, has some really spectacular features, that should encourage video mashing between users. It’s editing features, also using Flash, are better than what I saw with Motionbox. Any video can be cloned (unless restricted by the publisher), and other clips can be added to the cloned video. Sound files can be added to either overwrite existing audio or mix in with it. They also allow a number of “transition” features as effects. Overall, its pretty cool. Check it out by clicking “remix” on this video screen. Like YouTube, finished videos can be kept private, shared or made public. Jumpcuts provides code snippets to allow video playback from blogs and other websites as well. Unlike Motionbox, Jumpcut does not have a deep tagging feature, although Mike Folger says it is being built and that “it’s fairly straightforward using the Flash development tools”. The service is currently free and allows uploads of up to 50 MB (YouTube allows 100MB). A paid service will be available soon in → Read More
