So your friend sends you a video -- maybe of their kid doing something funny or a clip from a concert. Then what? A thumbs up. A quick text comment. That's about it. Videotape, which is poised to launch publicly within a couple months, wants to give you a more interactive format by letting you quickly edit -- or jump cut -- your friend's videos, which can be imported from their iPhone or Instagram or Vine accounts.
Lightning example: Stephen Callender, co-founder and chief product officer, has a buddy who posted a video of a turkey chasing him down a hill. Callender sees it on his Videotape feed, adds a quick "gobble, gobble!" voiceover and Videotape's app turns it into a new video of the turkey chasing the guy with Callender's new voiceover.
Then, Callender adds another jump cut, this time a video after the turkey gives up the chase: "That turkey was awesome!" he says looking into his iPhone 6 camera.
Beyond the goofy, Callender says that the goal is to make it a wide open platform where people could upload a video of a news event, say the next round of riots, and others could add their commentary by cutting in or adding their thoughts after the original video. Sounds a little like Vine.
Videotape's videos can run longer -- a 20 second max -- and they give fellow Videotapers a chance to add to the clip while preserving prior versions for viewing with a swipe.
Ultimately, there's a 40 second max after people add their jump cuts to the original. Videotape has a user-driven flagging system to report inappropriate content.
Videotape's CEO Greg Manriquez got the company started after he returned to Texas after starting a domain name brokerage firm called NameDrive in Europe and selling it to a private equity firm in Luxembourg. When he got back to Texas, he reached out to Callender and other acquaintances to build something new.
The team includes COO Dusty Allen, who played a year of professional baseball with the San Diego Padres and Detroit Tigers before getting into real estate development in Las Vegas; CFO Andrew Kramer, who worked in mergers and acquisitions in New York; and CTO Jay Oh, co-founder Qwiki, a video app later acquired by Yahoo for about $50 million and later shut down.
The team started with a $500,000 seed round from Riquez Capital, and it built a web platform for video interaction in 2014. But they realized that video's future is mobile. "If you're going to comment on a video, why don't you just put your face in it?" Callender said. "When we see the way people feel about online content that's so compelling around the internet... if it makes somebody cry, let's see them cry. If it makes someone laugh, let's see them laugh. It just makes it so much better."
High School Students Get Paid to Beta Test
Videotape, like many interactive apps, live and die by their ability to build a big base of users and contributors. And since younger generations tend to use apps most, Callender reached out to high schoolers through an intern from Westlake High School.
"High schoolers are really awesome at adopting new apps," Callender said. "So it was perfect. They're such natural users of it. And if you can be the first one in your school to have a new app, how crazy would that be?" The 20 or so high schoolers at Westlake get a little compensation for each post and for their product feedback, and they can win cash prizes for the best posts.
Videotape also has high schoolers using the app in southern California and Maui, where two of their employees work from remotely.
"We've taken a lot of product feedback from them," Callender said. "If there's something that's frustrating for them, that's always a red flag for me, and we've made some pretty sweeping changes based on their feedback."
Callender said he sees Videotape as a major app launch for Austin -- with most major apps based on the east or west coast. (You can check out the beta version here.)
"We're happy for our independence here and we're happy that we're not so distracted by everything that's going on in Silicon Valley," he said. "We're really just able to put our heads down and focus on product and do it in such a great city."
