About a year ago, Cisco said it was shutting down its Flip video camera business, despite the brand’s popularity. For consumers who were fans of the versatile digital video cameras, the news that Cisco was killing off future development of the product came as a shock.
But the move meant more than just the end of the road for the cameras themselves — it also called into question what would happen to all of the videos uploaded to FlipShare, the private video-sharing network that was offered by Cisco’s Pure Digital unit as an alternative to YouTube and other online networks.
Well Givit announced Thursday that those videos can stay online — so long as FlipShare users take a few steps to keep them there. Cisco will alert its FlipShare users that they can port the videos over to Givit’s private video-sharing service, which will provide up to 10 GB of free storage to all former FlipShare users. They can then also upload new videos to the service, using the same account information.
FlipShare is shutting down in December 2013 — enough time for most users to move their videos. And there are plenty of videos to switch over: Flip apparently has more than 3 million videos stored on the service that will be affected by the shutdown.
Givit can do this mainly because it’s owned and operated by San Diego-based startup Vmix, a white-label online video publishing platform that quietly provided the backend for the FlipShare service. That gives Givit/Vmix a huge potential new group of accounts, and it gets Cisco off the hook for a bunch of users for a service and devices that it no longer supports. All in all, a win-win-win.
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