How Is Vine Going To Impact Video?

There has been quite a buzz going around recently about a new video app that has hit the media landscape. This app is called: Vine. So what exactly is it? Well, this seemingly innocuous bit of social media is about to impact the way we consume video.  The premise of Vine is this: users share edited, looping videos with their followers. The catch? The videos can only be six seconds or less.

Six seconds seems incredibly short—and it is. But remember back in 2006, when Twitter was first released? The world rolled its eyes at the app’s 140-character word limit. How could any useful information be conveyed within such a tiny limit? Now, of course, we know that Twitter is one of the most popular websites in the world, with over 500 million users that produce a staggering 9,000 tweets per second. Twitter has moved well beyond individual users and is now non-optional for businesses, no matter how large or small, and words like “retweet” and “hashtag” have found their way permanently into our cultural vocabulary. Soon, Instagram would come along, following a similar format to Twitter but with a focus on the visual rather than text.

Vine Is The “Instagram For Videos.”

Vine has been coined the “Instagram for Video” (Instagram being the “Twitter for Pictures”), but its status as an app spin-off is likely to be short-lived.   That’s because unlike Instagram, Vine has, under our very noses, started a new genre of film.

YouTube started it, but YouTube’s ten-minute limit now seems exhaustingly long. The recent burst in popularity of the .gif is particularly telling: these short, silent looping videos that can be loaded like images have existed for over 20 years, but have only just made the leap from “annoying” to “cool.” Vine takes the .gif to the next level by adding sound. They’re not movies—there’s no loading time, and they play infinitely, over and over. The vine is something new.

New Companion To The Video Marketing Arsenal.

So what does this mean for video? Well, we’re just starting to find out. Vine is young enough that its users are only beginning to discover what doors the format can open. As on Twitter, comedians have quickly taken to Vine, as the six seconds are perfect for punchlines of both the audio and visual type. Artists have discovered Vine’s live-editing interface is excellent for stop-motion. And businesses, too, are trying to figure out how the rapidfire, addictive quality of the Vine can work in their favor.

Now this doesn’t mean that Vine is going to replace the other means of video marketing out there. Think of it rather as another tool in the box. A quick little mechanism to drop word to an audience in a short amount of time. It will be tricky to get your message into the 6 second parameters. But that also brings the challenge to be creative!

Literary legend has it that Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to write a novel in only six words. His response? “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” There is no limit to the depth of what we can create, no matter how limiting the parameters. And when it comes to find, perhaps we will find that a six-second limit is, in fact, quite liberating.