Animoto Now Available For Commercial Use

<a href="http://www.crunchbase.com/company/animoto"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.