Gfycat, fresh off its $10 million seed round and debut of its first mobile app for texting and editing its own flavor of GIFs, announced today that it’s acquiring the Mac desktop application GIF Brewery in an effort at expanding its GIF creation capabilities. The GIF Brewery app, which lets users create, edit and share GIFs from their Mac, has seen over 110,000 downloads to date, and is ranked at the number 5 paid Photo & Video app in the U.S. Mac App Store. It was also among the top 60 paid apps overall in the U.S. last month.
That’s not a massive user base, but it is one that’s explicitly devoted to the process of content creation – something Gfycat can take advantage of in terms of fleshing out its own collection of original GIFs.
The Mac software works by having users first make a screen recording using either their webcam or by importing a video file. They can then resize and crop the video, set their desired frame rate, apply image filters, and add multiple captions or overlay images. When editing is complete, the GIF can be shared on iMessage or Mail, and now, it will be able to be uploaded to Gfycat, too, as a part of its new integration.
In addition to the acquisition of the IP itself, Gfycat is also bringing on GIF Brewery’s creator Patrick Rogers, who is joining the startup’s Mountain View team where he will working making the software work with Gfycat. Rogers had originally built the app in 2011 as a side project, but later focused on it full-time as it grew in popularity among the paid apps.
What makes the app appealing to Gfycat is the fact that it’s fairly simple to use, despite its comprehensive feature set. This, in part, is due to how Rogers listened and responded to user feedback while rolling out updates over the years.
Gfycat itself, meanwhile, is an up-and-coming GIF creation and sharing service, which today counts 75 million monthly actives on and off platform, and users who view over 1.5 billion GIFs monthly.
Technically speaking, however, Gfycat’s GIFs aren’t actually .gif files. They’re made in a way that allows them to show 16 million colors versus .gif’s support for 256 colors. But, these looping videos with richer colors, effectively act the same way – they can be texted to friends via iMessage, or posted to the web and other social platforms.
However, the company supports GIFs, as well, and makes 100% of its content available in both formats. GIF Brewery, too, will be able to create both GIFs and Gfycat’s silent, looping videos, the company says.
“GIF Brewery 3 by Gfycat will provide the ability to create stunning GIFs from video files, leveraging simple-to-use editing capabilities specifically tailored for GIFs. ,” explains Gfycat CEO Richard Rabbat. “As we looked at GIF apps that can make GIF creation much easier, GIF Brewery stood out as best in class GIF editing tool. As GIFs evolve from only kitschy pop culture loops to an original and versatile medium, we wanted to provide high quality, professional-grade editing” he added.
Following this acquisition, GIF Brewery will become a free application.
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