While many mobile video apps offer social sharing, the latest wave is about social recording — making the process of capturing video more fun and interactive. We reported on Vyclone, a startup that lets you automatically merge multiple videos into one film and now there’s Streamweaver, a Nashville mobile startup that is taking a similar approach.
While Vyclone’s mobile app ultimately turned multiple video streams into one finished product — either automatically or manually by users — Streamweaver puts it all together into one split-screen view. Up to four users can record up to 60 seconds each from the Streamweaver iOS app and their video is synced and presented in one clip. Streamweaver users don’t have to be in the same location to contribute to one video but they must have at least a few seconds of overlap for the app to merge their streams. If the users stagger their recording, Streamweaver adjusts and shows however many streams are overlapping at the moment.
Users start by firing up their app and register through their Facebook account. Then when they want to start recording, they can fire off an invitation to other users, who get a push notification. Inside the app, users can see who’s been invited, who’s joined and who’s recording. After the recording is done, the streams are uploaded to Streamweaver’s servers and the finished products is returned soon after. Users can watch through the app or on Streamweaver.com and they can share out to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, SMS, and email.
Streamweaver’s CEO and co-founder Erik Carlson told me the service is designed to make video recording fun for friends. It preserves everyone’s video unlike Vyclone, which displays only one camera view at a time. And Carlson said Streamweaver is also useful for friends in more than one location, allowing them to contribute to one finished product. Streamweaver launched last year and has raised seed funding from the Tennessee Community Ventures Fund and Mountain Group Capital.
I wonder how many people will actually use apps like Streamweaver and Vyclone on a regular basis. Getting the most out of this means getting people to rally around a joint recording project. But even with push notifications, it’s hard to get people coordinated, and you still need something worthwhile to record.
But I like how Streamweaver captures fun moments in ways that one video alone can’t convey. There’s something interesting about incorporating multiple simultaneous views, especially for events such as birthdays, performance and sports competitions that are fun to watch from different angles. And with so many people carrying around smartphones, it’s cool to be able to take video and create more than just a one-off clip that lives apart from other videos shot at the same event. It might not work for everyday videos but it’s interesting to see how mobile video is getting more social on the front end.
