Microsoft’s portfolio of productivity tools might get a new addition in the form of video editing software. Microsoft announced the acquisition of Clipchamp on Tuesday, a business that provides web-based video production and editing software that allows anybody to create video presentations, promotions, or videos for social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Clipchamp is a “natural match” for Microsoft to enhance its existing productivity experiences in Microsoft Office 365 for families, schools, and companies, according to the company.
Microsoft was interested in the acquisition for a number of reasons. Today, thanks to a growing collection of new tools, more people are making and utilizing video, thanks to a growing number of new tools that allow anybody — even non-professionals — to conduct complex edits and generate high-quality video material quickly and simply. According to Microsoft, this has allowed video to become a new form of “document” for businesses to use to propose ideas, explain processes, and interact with team members.
Clipchamp also piqued the company’s interest because it combined “the simplicity of a web app with the full computing power of a PC with graphics processing unit (GPU) acceleration,” according to the company. As a result, the programme is a suitable fit for Microsoft Windows users as well.
Clipchamp had developed a number of online video production and editing tools, including Clipchamp Create, which allows users to trim, clip, crop, rotate, and speed control their videos, as well as add text, audio, pictures, colors, and filters. It also includes templates, free stock video and audio libraries, screen recorders, text-to-speech tools, and other tools for streamlining a brand’s typefaces, colors, and logos for usage in video, among other things.
Clipchamp Utilities was a defunct collection of utilities that featured a video compressor and converters, as well as an in-browser webcam recorder. However, some of this functionality was transferred to the new Clipchamp app.
Creators may pick between several output styles and aspect ratios for prominent social media networks after creating films using Clipchamp, making it a popular tool for online marketers.
Clipchamp has grown to over 17 million registered users and serves over 390,000 enterprises since its inception in 2013, expanding at a pace of 54 percent year over year. As the epidemic pushed more firms to operate remotely, corporations began to employ video for training, communication, reporting, and other purposes.
Clipchamp experienced an 186 percent growth in video exports in the first half of 2021. The 16:9 aspect ratio increased by 189 percent, while the 9:16 aspect ratio expanded by 140 percent for posting to places like Instagram Stories and TikTok, and the 1:1 aspect ratio for Instagram grew by 72 percent. Screen recording increased by 57 percent, while webcam recording increased by 65 percent.
Clipchamp CEO Alexander Dreiling commented on this increase in July, stating that the company’s crew had nearly quadrupled in the previous year.
“On average, we’re recruiting two times as many users as we were a year ago, while simultaneously double the usage rate, implying that more people are generating video content than ever before. While social media videos have always been at the forefront of company demands, we’ve seen a quick uptake of internal communication use cases on our platform over the last year, with a lot of screen and webcam recording,” he added.
Microsoft would not disclose the purchase price, but Crunchbase reports that Clipchamp had raised over $15 million in investment.
This isn’t Microsoft’s first foray into the video industry.
When the Trump government was trying to compel a sale of the China-owned video social network TikTok, which Trump had labelled a national security concern, the business was one of the bidders. (ByteDance would have had to divest TikTok’s U.S. businesses in order to keep TikTok functioning in the United States.)
However, the transaction was never completed since the Biden administration decided to put the endeavor on hold.) Microsoft also created a commercial video service called Stream a few years ago, with the goal of allowing businesses to utilize video as readily as consumers can on YouTube. It bought Flipgrid, a social learning platform that used short video clips for collaboration, in 2018. Microsoft has also been adding additional video features to its team communication software, Microsoft Teams, as remote work has become the standard.
Following Adobe’s $1.28 acquisition of the video review and collaboration platform Frame.io, which has been used by over a million people since its inception in 2014, Microsoft has announced its own agreement. Unlike Clipchamp, whose features are intended for usage by anybody at work, school, or home, Frame.io is geared more toward creative professionals.
Clipchamp will continue to expand within Microsoft, according to Dreiling, with an emphasis on making video editing more accessible to more people.
“Microsoft is one of the few IT businesses with the kind of history and reach that it does. He added, “We all grew up with classic Microsoft products and have been using them ever since.” “Becoming a member of Microsoft gives us the opportunity to be a part of a long-term legacy.
Nothing could make our future appear more exciting than what we have front of us right now. We’ve always stated at Clipchamp that there’s no such thing as a shortage of potential in video; in fact, there’s an excess of it. All we have to do now is find out how to grasp it. “We can approach exploiting our opportunity in totally different ways inside Microsoft,” Dreiling remarked.
Microsoft did not indicate when Clipchamp would be integrated into its existing software package, just that it would provide additional information at a later time.
