Video Sharing Has Reached the Year 2004
Talk about 13 going on 30, I recently tried out Musical.ly and it made me feel like a 13 year old again. First, let me establish that I have ZERO musical and production talent, and yet I was making lip sync music videos in just seconds. But the app is not only delighting amateurs like me, even the professional performer Jimmy Fallon gave credit to Musical.ly for his moves in his lip sync battle skit.
Musical.ly is yet another platform to take on short-form video sharing, using soundtracking as a twist. Vine first popularized the format back in 2012, Snapchat enforced it with the introduction of Stories in 2013, and then last week, Instagram also introduced its clone of Stories. Both the success of Musical.ly and the move from Instagram supports a trend I’ve noticed amongst my millennial friends: they are sharing more videos on Snapchat than photos on Facebook/Instagram.
The current age of video sharing draws many similarities to that of photo sharing in 2004, when Facebook first hit every university campus. Doing it was easy and effortless because both the concept and social pressures of curation has not yet developed. Then the online world was hit with years of photo overload until finally in 2010, Instagram introduced high-quality filters to separate signal and noise.
The same trend could apply to video sharing over a much shorter timeline. Video content format is at its nascent stage: we’ve overcome the barrier to entry but most of the creators are young amateurs with silly filters and emojis. As these creators and their consumers age, they will long for quality, and so enters the next killer social app that brings professional video production and allows anyone to become the equivalent of Youtube stars today (there are already a growing number of Musical.ly celebrities).
Quality is not here yet is because video editing is still too hard to do on mobile. There is a learning curve to cut and paste clips together and add sound tracks and voice overs. But what if all of that was powered by Artificial Intelligence and as accessible as adding an Instagram filter to a photo?
Musical.ly has gotten one part right so far: you choose your desired song before you record, which removes a step from the post-production editing process. The next step is for a video sharing network with critical mass like Snapchat, Instagram, or even Musical.ly to seamlessly integrate the video-editing capabilities of an app like Splice.
Splice is already really intuitive, but it’s not fast enough. The use case that we need to build for is: I want to share (every?) moments of my life at high quality and immediately with people I care about. We need true post-production filters, containers of themed visual edits and sound tracks that you could easily apply to a clip, to replace the dog-face filters. Today we are throwing rainbow filters on our videos like we are throwing t-shirts on our kids, the next generation of apps need to enable us to dress our videos in the right attire for any occasion.
