Vine (service)
Vine was a mobile video-sharing application that allowed users to create and share short looping videos, or "Vines," of up to six seconds in length. The app, developed by entrepreneurs Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll, was launched in January 2013 after being acquired by Twitter for $30 million during its beta phase. Users could easily record videos by pressing and holding the screen, which fostered creative expression through stop-motion techniques and other innovative filming methods. At its peak, Vine gained significant popularity, amassing over 40 million registered users by late 2013 and becoming a platform where many users achieved minor celebrity status through viral videos.
Despite its initial success, Vine faced increasing competition from platforms like Instagram, which offered longer video durations and a broader social media experience. The app struggled to maintain its user base and profitability, leading to its eventual discontinuation in October 2016. Nonetheless, Vine's cultural impact included influencing social media marketing strategies and providing a space for diverse voices and creative expression, particularly among communities of color. Following its closure, many former users reflected on Vine's unique contribution to the landscape of online content creation and social media.
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Vine (service)
Vine was a video sharing mobile application (app) that allowed users to record short looping videos up to six seconds long, known as "Vines," on their smartphones. Videos could then be shared with others or "revined," in which a user shared a different user’s video. Videos could be viewed via the Vine app, embedded on a web page, or shared on the social media website Twitter. To hear a video’s audio, the user had to click on a speaker icon.
The concept of Vine was to share "moments" and was heavily influenced by the animated graphic interchange format (GIF), a type of short, repeating video clip. Vine was purchased by the social media company Twitter, which made the acquisition before the app was even launched.
Brief History
Entrepreneurs Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll developed Vine in June 2012. Their idea was to build a tool for easily cutting together video clips. Their first version allowed users to record an unlimited amount of video, but testers encountered problems when trying to send their videos via text messaging. The developers tried out different time limits between five and ten seconds before finally settling on six.
The developers also decided to make the short videos loop, or automatically replay once finished, so that the short play time would not feel anticlimactic. This feature, similar to animated GIFs, became one of the defining characteristics of the app. It also helped users avoid quickly using up the available data on their cellphone plans—an important consideration in what were essentially the early days of smartphone video. In order to make Vine feel unlike other smartphone video recorders or analog video camera controls, the developers decided to do away with buttons like "play" and "record." Instead the simple interface allows users to start recording simply by pressing their phone screen and stop by releasing it, creating a sense of direct connection to the images.
In October 2012, Twitter purchased Vine for a reported $30 million while the app was still in its beta testing stage. Many observers believed that Twitter purchased Vine in an attempt to compete with third-party video hosting services and to enhance its existing advertising methods. The app was officially launched on January 24, 2013, as a separate service, so that users would not need a Twitter account to sign up for Vine. During Vine’s first month of operation, 2.8 percent of active Twitter users registered with the app, making it more popular than other video sharing services. Its percentage of new users grew steadily, rather than quickly leveling off like some experts predicted.
In April 2013, despite having no advertising campaign, Vine became the most-downloaded free app in the Apple computer online store. By June 2013 Vine had thirteen million registered users, and by August 2013 that number had increased to more than forty million. It was the fastest growing app that year with an estimated growth of 403 percent. Some Vine users rose to minor celebrity status as social media stars, and many popular viral videos originated on the app.
As Vine grew in popularity, more features were added. Initially the app only allowed users to record video with rear-facing cameras (those with the lens pointed away from the user) on their smartphones. In April 2013 the developers added the capacity for front-facing cameras (those with the lens pointed toward the user) so that users could easily film themselves. The loop counter, which keeps track of how many times a Vine has been watched, went into effect in July 2014.
Though the world of social media was already notorious as a fickle market, with new platforms ballooning in popularity before collapsing even more quickly, Vine appeared to be a success story to many observers. However, in June 2013 the social media app Instagram, which originated as a photo-sharing and editing app, added the capacity to upload videos. This made Instagram Vine's chief competitor, and a formidable one: Instagram already had a user base ten times larger than the fledgling Vine, and it allowed fifteen seconds of video compared to Vine's six. Vine continued to grow throughout 2014, but the impact of Instagram's lead in users quickly became apparent. Users found it easier to use one service for both photos and video, and people using Instagram proved unlikely to also embrace Vine as they valued the social networks they had already established. Instagram also began to pay celebrity users, luring away some who had made their reputation on Vine, while other competitors, such as Snapchat, also grew in popularity.
Vine continued to introduce new features in order to distinguish itself from Instagram, but the company's management fell into turmoil as the competition mounted. Hoffman, one of Vine's founders, abruptly left the company in 2014. Jason Toff, an executive from technology giant Google was hired as general manager, but he left after only about a year at Vine. Twitter moved Vine's operations to its own New York office, frustrating many employees. Twitter's efforts to create marketing deals with social media celebrities through the talent agency Niche failed to generate positive income for Vine. By 2016 the service cost an estimated US$10 million each month to keep running and continued to lose money, and parent company Twitter was also struggling to grow and turn a profit.
On October 27, 2016, Twitter and Vine announced that the looping video service would be discontinued. The company's statement clarified that the Vine website and existing videos would remain available, allowing users to continue watching their creations and download them as they wished. However, the mobile app was taken offline, preventing the uploading of any new Vines. The rollback of support for the app was planned to unfold over several months, giving fans and users ample time to save their content.
Impact
Vine utilized a punctuated recording method designed for simplicity. Users could record an uninterrupted six-second video or a sequence of separate shots that were automatically linked. To record, users held their finger on the screen, and took it off to pause. The ability to quickly pause and resume filming allowed users to easily record stop motion animation. A grid could also be applied to the recording screen to aid the framing of shots. The "ghost" feature further helped users align their videos from shot to shot by displaying a transparent image of the last frame during pauses.
As with Twitter, users could "follow" other users in order to see videos they posted in a feed within the app, making it a form of social media. In 2013, Vine introduced channels in an effort to make it easier for users to discover videos beyond those by users they follow. Using the app’s "explore" tab, users could browse content according to topics such as animals, comedy, and sports. An update in October 2014 allowed users to follow these channels in order to get curated content inserted into their home page feeds.
As the variety of different channels indicated, Vine users created a wide range of content. Some of the most popular types of videos included comedy, stunts, and dancing. Some users who gained a large following became celebrities based on their videos alone, while previously established celebrities could use the app to connect with fans or market themselves. Many musicians posted previews of new music to their Vine accounts to create hype; for example on April 16, 2013, the popular electronic music act Daft Punk revealed the track list to their album "Random Access Memories" on Vine. US president Barack Obama even used the app to release official White House video messages.
Businesses also took to Vine for social media marketing, since it was easy to use and could deliver a succinct message that was easily processed by viewers. Since Vine allowed companies to see how many times their videos have been viewed, they could gauge what was working and what was not in terms of marketing. In September 2013 the fast food chain Dunkin’ Donuts became the first company to run a television commercial made entirely from a video recorded with Vine.
Vine was also used for journalistic purposes. When the Boston Marathon bombings occurred in Boston, Massachusetts on April 15, 2013, Vine user Doug Lorman posted a video of the explosion that he recorded from a television news report. Within an hour Lorman’s Vine had been shared on Twitter over 15,700 times and seen by over 35,000 people.
Following the announcement that Twitter would discontinue the Vine app, many fans of the service expressed their dissatisfaction in an outpouring of support. Many social commentators analyzed the rapid rise and fall of Vine, including its initial novelty as a unique platform for personal expression and its role in developing social media celebrities. Some observers also argued that the app had provided a media outlet that was especially important to people of color, particularly African Americans, for everything from humor to documenting discrimination.
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