A couple days ago I posted about Animoto- a very cool web service that I’ve been alpha testing for the past few months. In the most basic of descriptions (and this really doesn’t do Animoto justice), the site matches your photos to music for a unique, one of a kind “slideshow.” Honestly though, it’s super cool– like nothing else I’ve ever seen.

So, to honor their public beta launch today at around 3:22am Eastern Time, and mostly because Animoto rocks the hizouse, I was fortunate enough to convince Brad Jefferson, Co-Founder and CEO of Animoto.com to give us an exclusive interview. Thanks Brad, and thanks Animoto! Enjoy, and definitely go check out the site! [for some nitty gritty details, check out the Animoto Press Kit]

BLOGADILLA: Animoto is an entirely new way to interact with and view photos. What is the vision behind the project? Has your team’s vision changed as you’ve developed the site, or has it remained constant from the beginning?

BRAD: Part of the vision for Animoto is to catch the internet up to the type of production value commonly seen in film and television, and then give that type of production value to people in a way that is simple yet powerful. Our technology is focused on emulating the actual process that a post-production crew for film and television goes through. To that end, the fun part is that our Cinematic Artificial Intelligence algorithm is really more of an art than a science so the potential for improvement is unending.

BLOGADILLA: What do you see as the main target for Animoto: to operate as a standalone entity, or to interface with existing websites, such as myspace, facebook, etc?

BRAD: Short answer, all the above! We see Animoto.com as the place where users create, collect, share and view Animoto videos but the consumption of Animoto videos is not limited to our website. Through a partnership with an interesting company called Clearspring, our users can post their Animoto videos to any website, such as social network sites like MySpace and Facebook, with a click of a button. We plan to also allow consumption of Animoto videos through cell phones and ipods in the future.

BLOGADILLA: Animoto’s slogan is bold: “Welcome to the end of slideshows.” Do you see Animoto as a viable replacement for slideshows, or just an alternative? For example, a traditional slideshow allows a presenter to focus more on one image than another, or examine this image in different ways. Users will see that Animoto gives the ability to spotlight a photo or two, but this is still relatively static after production. Do you envision a more dynamic, interactive Animoto in the future, or am I getting ahead of myself?

BRAD: If we are able to implement the entirety of our vision over the next several years I do think that Animoto videos will be a permanent replacement for slideshows. Slideshows are great but slideshows with music are better. Our bet simply takes that one step further in that, coming from the film and television industry, we believe that there is no better way to consume images than when the presentation of the images is perfectly synchronized to the every nuance of a piece of music, such as beat, tempo, genre, energy, etc. That’s our passion and that’s what we’re 100% focused on. If we do our job right and master what we call Cinematic Artificial Intelligence then I think that, given the choice, people will opt to watch images in Animoto videos rather than in traditional slideshows. That said, based on our beta user feedback we are evaluating simple ways to give our users more control over the creative process as we do want Animoto to be all things to all people, eventually. For instance, we’ll probably find an opportunity to give people a more traditional feeling in terms of speed of transitions between images, but we currently like the fact that Animoto is more about sharing a story or narrative through a collection of images versus focusing on any one image. We are currently focused on the MTV, MySpace and Facebook generations who like to consume information faster and with more energy. The bottom line is that if you think what we’re doing now is cool, just wait!

BLOGADILLA: What have been (or do you forsee as) the biggest challenges for Animoto?

BRAD: Building a scalable infrastructure to support the Animoto website and service was a competency that we had to learn on the job. After analyzing several different options we decided to go with a new service from Amazon called Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS allows you to hook into their infrastructure and pay for services like bandwidth, storage and processing like you’d pay for a utility. The beauty of their set of services is that there is no upfront capital expenditure required and your payments are perfectly scaled to your usage, unlike most hosting services. Time will tell if this was the right bet for us but we love Amazon’s vision for AWS.

BLOGADILLA: More and more frequently, there have been a lot of questions and concerns about copyrighted content being shared and distributed online (all the way back to Napster and the RIAA as well as YouTube and Viacom, for example). How is Animoto handling these issues, both in terms of copyrighted images and/or copyrighted music potentially being used by users? Is there anything in the works to license music from popular artists, or on the complete flipside, perhaps accept submissions from independent musicians who seek to use Animoto to get additional exposure?

BRAD: Music inspired the founding of Animoto in much the same way it injects life into every Animoto video creation. We deeply respect the creative process behind every song and are passionate about ensuring that copyright holders’ creative property is protected in accordance with copyright law. When creating an Animoto video, a user has the option to select a song from our collection of licensed music or to upload their own mp3 file for which they have permission. We’d like to see the 3 million-plus bands on MySpace use Animoto to create their own music videos using their own music and images files. For users who are looking for a variety of music to use on Animoto beyond our collection of songs we suggest checking out Creative Commons. We are in the process of building out our library of licensed music and in the future, as you suggest, we will have an easy way for indie musicians to submit their music to Animoto to be included in our music collection.

BLOGADILLA: I’ve been playing around more and more with Animoto, and I think one of the best features is being able to grab content from other online sites, such as facebook and flickr. Did you encounter any trouble in terms of working with these companies, or were they eager to ‘play along’ ?

BRAD: Plain and simple, we chose to work with the photosharing sites that have open APIs. We’d love to be able to offer our users the ability to grab photos from any photosharing site and hope that the sites not currently represented on our site will provide an API in the future.

BLOGADILLA: Do you think Animoto will ever support video, or will you be sticking solely to photos?

BRAD: Yes, the inclusion of video is on our product roadmap and we’re really excited by cool ways to incorporate video into Animoto videos.

BLOGADILLA: Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know?

BRAD: Yes, 2 things. First, while we feel that we are really putting our best foot forward with our public beta release today, we know that issues will likely arise. Please give us as much feedback as you can through our ‘Got Feedback’ link. Second, there’s a slightly hidden feature on Animoto.com that is worth knowing about: full-screen video viewing. To watch an Animoto video in full-screen simply click on the little expand icon to the left of the volume control. Enjoy!

BLOGADILLA: Thanks so much for your time, Brad. Best of luck with the launch today!

–

Here’s another example of what Animoto can do– check out some snaphots from SteveB and my EuroTrip last summer:



(visit Animoto.com)

Tags: art, geekery, infinite coolness, interview, music, technology, video, websites
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 1:49 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.