It’s no secret that we’re big fans of Animoto, a website that lets you easily create photo and video slideshows matched to music. The startup basically allows you to take your images, video and your music and mash them together to create cool videos. Not only is the platform easy to use, but it also renders the pictures so they’re in-step with the music you’ve chosen, adding nice transition effects. Today, the company is expanding its ecosystem with a new partner platform that allows third-party developers to embed Animoto’s video slideshow creation tool on their sites.
As we wrote a year ago, Animoto previously opened up its API with Animoto Quickstart, which allows websites to connect their own content, including photos, video clips and music to Animoto as the first step in creating an Animoto video. But with this functionality, users on partner sites still have to click to Animoto to actually create and edit the slideshow.
With the new Partner Platform, developers can actually customize the video creation service into their environments, allowing users to create and develop video slideshows, start to finish, within third-party sites.
Already, Kodak Gallery, AG Interactive Inc. and Aviary.com have signed on as partners to benefit from the Animoto platform. Kodak’s Photo Moments service is weaving Animoto into their user experience so that its users can make a slideshow from their Kodak Moments photos in their Kodak Gallery. Kodak is actually charging users for the service and will share revenue with Animoto. Similarly, AG Interactive’s property Webshots.com is rolling out an Animoto-powered Premium Subscription.
Partners also pay for use of the API, so not only is the Partner Platform expanding Animoto’s ecosystem, but it also creating a new revenue stream for the startup. Animoto’s CEO and co-founder Brad Jefferson tells us that the company is cash-flow positive and just passed 2.5 million users. And he says that in the future, it’s likely that the majority of Animoto’s revenue will come from partners as opposed to subscriptions and plans to announce more partners in the new platform soon.
