Animoto, the web application that allows users to quickly and easily create personalized, professional-quality videos from their own photos and music, is announcing their first commercial-use service called Animoto for Business.
With this new offering Animoto is targeting businesses ranging from the mom’s-and-pop’s to large enterprises. Commercial subscribers will have the same functionality as the consumer subscribers, with the major differences being that music will be licensed for commercial use and the addition of unlimited access to DVD-quality downloads in both MP4 and ISO formats. Paying customers will also be able select a cover screen photograph (no more green screen). Additionally, embedded commercial videos won’t have a persistent Animoto watermark, nor link-back buttons to Animoto.com at the end of video.
In addition to the new commercial features, Animoto has also recently upgraded some of the consumer side features such as DVD-quality (864×480 resolution) downloads, faster video render times (4x faster), and support for “odd shaped” image uploads (long images with text previously were not handled correctly).
Animoto partnered with ten companies for the commercial launch, ranging from large media companies like Getty Images, to wedding photographers, and real estate brokers. They are attempting to represent its broad and diverse application by showing the many different uses and advantages to any size company.
I made a promo video for TechCrunch50 with a trial commercial account, and I have to admit I was impressed. It was surprisingly quick and easy to upload photos, choose music, describe and then render. After a few minutes, I came up with what you see below.
Animoto for Business is a subscription service that gives unlimited access to create, present, view, and download commercial-use videos. Subscriptions cost $99 per user for three months, or $249 per user for one year. Animoto was founded in August 2006 and was recently funded by Amazon for an undisclosed amount.
Wow - Animoto really knows what they are doing. That presentation is just as good as one that would be made for up to $4,000-5,000 by a videographer.
A market they might want to think about going after are school tv stations - everybody remembers their friends being newscasters on the school news during homeroom in junior high/high school. This could change their world because right now they are stuck buying expensive technology to build all of this -
Nice video -
Cool stuff. I tried the “consumer” version a while ago and it’s definitely cool.
But I’m curious to see if the potential customer base for the professional version is that broad and diverse.
The video effects are gorgeous, but you don’t really have a choice (besides the music), they’re selected kinda randomly.
As a professional, you may want to get more editing features, like choosing your style or whatever.
Wow I wonder how competitors like WellcomeMat and Mixpo are going to deal with this, especially if Animoto tunes up its editing features. Definitely cheaper and easier to use than Mixpo and the quality is infinitely better than the lot of them.
It is really good to see that Amazon are still going to let this startup they just acquired grow. Animoto is a great idea and because of the amount it is being use, could be great for promotion in terms of music. Im really looking forward to seeing this grow!!
Steven - http://crenk.com
This is a truly great service.
Adding video would be great too. Can you add narration over the final video?
Except that with a professional, you won’t have to keep paying him/ her to keep embedding the video. And you have to keep the Animoto logo - something a business might not want to do.
Unless their explanation is just poorly written, I’ve understood the terms to mean that if you pay for a commercial license, make a video, embed it, then let your license expire, you can no longer use that video. Again, maybe it’s poorly worded, but I take it to mean that even if you upload the video to YouTube, you still have to keep paying.
What I’m looking forwards to is being able to remove the Animoto logo and seeing an API.
Wouldnt it be nice to have articles without anonymous authors, especially on techcrunch?
and your the one to speak guest commenter!!
http://www.crunchnow.com
@8, Mike must have found a GPL blog writing robot to add to his crunch network.
Animoto is nice, but the effects are repetitive and beyond the initial wow value, it doesn’t seem to have a lasting effect for me.
That’s the problem with all automation. It will never be as unique as that person tweaking their video in final cut to upload to youtube.
For being only a 2 year old company, it sounds like a high growth company. Their choice of partnerships suggests they are catering their services to a wide range of clients, as well as a small focus on vertical markets. How does a company like this survive an economic recession? http://www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?RTA=web2
You know all those sites that have their own youtube functionality with ffmpeg?
If people just wrote some effects filters for libavfilter we could run uploaded video through ffmpeg filters for these type of effects before converting it to FLV.
Why shouldn’t every video upload site have this same functionality?
It’s just an token effect anyway. As to where and how the AV the filters are applied, that can be handled by a simple algorithm.
I can’t afford to have nice libAVfilters done, so if you can fund this so all websites can have this very same functionality let me know and I’ll put the jobs up on oDesk. Where are the rich philanthropists when you need them?
nm, they’re doing this with pictures, so you wouldn’t need an AV filter, you’re applying this to 1 frame across a timeline. I still say somebody should fund an FFMPEG plugin so the rest of us can apply this as well. It doesn’t seem very hard if you have the time.
WOW! This is outstanding. Thanks for the info.
Wow, what an odd way to welcome in a new TC blogger. I know who wrote this.
Wow! It’s really cool! I like Animoto
This looks GREAT! I wonder if the tech used behind this is just Flash/Flex.
It is too expensive !
Agreed with 15… What a strange way to usher in a new writer (since I’m assuming that’s what it is). A site like this is too smart to steal directly from another blog and call it a “guest writer.”
But anyway… this is a gimmick. Sure, it looks good. But I have serious doubts about its viability long term. What happens when every slideshow looks like this? It’ll become pretty obvious immediately that you’re just a cheap bastard.