Last year Instagram made its first acquisition, buying Y Combinator company Luma which had come up with an app which could stabilize normally shaky video. It needed this stabilisation technology for obvious photographic reasons, leaving the way open for a new company to take its place.
Steady is a new app from long-time online video startup Stupeflix, which has slowly but surely been building up a stack of very interesting video-related IP over the last few years. If there is a company which has both created a big idea platform and stayed under the radar, it’s Paris-based Stupeflix. And it’s barely raised money – from both Seedcamp and S500 Startups.
The Steady app allows you to shoot action videos from your iPhone with almost cinematic stabilization. The resulting videos are editable and sharable, can be shot in slo-mo (iPhone5 & up) and created in square or 16:9 recording formats. You can share them directly on Vine, Instagram, WhatsApp, or other ways.
Steady uses the iPhone gyroscope sensors to know where the camera is pointing while you record, and compensates for all the stepping, bobbing, shaking that happens while you hold the camera. It’s now available for download worldwide on the App Store, for $1.99.
Meanwhile, Stupeflix has been building up a suite of apps for its platform. The Replay app (free on the App Store) turns photos and rushes into videos, instantly, on your iPhone. And Stupeflix Studio (launched 2010) is a web application, used by to easily create videos.
The Stupeflix API (launched 2009) is still the only self-serve developer platform to create video content at scale. Around 30M videos have been created by developers for brands like RedBull, Sprint, Coca-Cola, Amex, etc.