Two of the founders behind ill-fated Vine are back with a quirky new app for live video called Hype. And they've already managed to attract the backing of Snapchat's first investor: Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Ventures.
Co-founders Colin Kroll and Rus Yusupov say they want to bring the same caliber of video editing tools from the professional TV world to mobile video, the latter of which has "remained relatively simple and one-dimensional."
The Hype app, which is available now in the App Store, is anything but simple and one-dimensional. It can be best described as a mix of Twitter-owned Periscope and Snapchat — with an extra dose of weird.
Like other live streaming apps, you create broadcasts for people to watch and comment on in real time. Where Hype differs is in all of the creative editing tools it offers, like the ability to show GIFs, webpages, feature viewer comments onscreen, play background music, and bring in other people for dual broadcasts.
Hype's cofounders say beta testers have used the app to host daily news shows and review video games. Kroll and Yusupov have been working on the app for the past year with a small team in New York City.
"This isn’t just about porting TV genres to mobile video," Liew, who led Hype's first round of funding, said in a Medium post on Wednesday. "It is about creating new genres, native to the mobile native format and to the mobile-native audience."
Or as Yusupov put it during a Hype broadcast on Wednesday, "We're blending the lines between the host and the audience. You become the content."
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