Groovideo Launches Mobile App To Easily Create Awesome Group Videos

The mobile video space is heating up, as a number of startups have launched to help users create and share interesting videos with one another. To date, most have been limited to individual users uploading videos and posting them to other social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Maybe they can add filters, maybe automatically edit their videos and stitch them. But the idea of “social” video has been mostly limited to “Here, social friends and followers — watch my video.”

Groovideo has a different idea for how to make videos social, by letting users create awesome content together through its mobile and web apps. Groovideo works like this: Users invite their friends to contribute to videos, each shoot their own short clips, which they upload to Groovideo’s servers, and the startup automatically stitches them all together.

According to founder Ron Zohar, Groovideo was created out of a desire to simplify the process of creating videos for special events — like weddings and birthdays. What they found was that the process of getting multiple video files from friends and family was a huge hassle in and of itself, and that’s before someone even gets to editing.

Groovideo simplifies the whole process by using an editing algorithm to automatically create videos once users upload clips. When more clips are added, the app recuts those videos. Users can upload files that they’ve shot with their mobile cameras, or record greetings from a web cam.

In its early release, Zohar says the team is seeing pretty impressive number from users asking friends and family to contribute to their videos. The average video has about 25 people invited to participate, with 10-12 actually uploading clips. Final videos tend to be about two minutes long, according to Zohar.

I’ve seen a few other apps like this — most notably Vyclone, which I like a whole lot. But while Vyclone relies on location to determine whether videos should be automatically edited together, Groovideo lets users contribute their content from anywhere. So you could create a crowdsourced wedding video from different clips shot by attendees — but users who weren’t necessarily at the wedding can also contribute their own thoughts and well wishes.

Groovideo was founded by a team of five friends in Tel Aviv, and the startup participated in Upwest Labs, an incubator focused on bringing Israeli entrepreneurs to Silicon Valley.