Enlarge (credit: YouTube, Casey Neistat)
CNN just brought one of the biggest vloggers on YouTube into its family. The news outlet acquired the startup Beme, a stripped-down Snapchat-like video-sharing app created by Matt Hackett and YouTuber Casey Neistat. According to Variety, a new venture will come out of the acquisition. Beme is shutting down, and its 11 employees, including Neistat, will join CNN to start a new media brand focused on millennial viewers. The Wall Street Journal reports that the deal is valued at $25 million.
Hackett, who once was the vice president of engineering at Tumblr, will help build the brand’s core technology while also helping to build new mobile video features for CNN’s digital properties. Neistat, who has almost 5.8 million subscribers on YouTube, will serve as the brand’s executive producer and shape its “editorial vision.”
It’s likely that CNN will want to incorporate some of Beme’s technology into this new brand or possibly some of its existing digital properties. Beme essentially forced the users to film what’s around them rather than turning the camera on themselves. The app let users share four-second video clips by covering the top portion of the front of an iPhone, near the earpiece and the front-facing camera. This is most easily done by holding the iPhone to your chest, with the rear camera facing outward. This almost makes the phone “a stand-in for one’s body,” as The New York Times once put it. Thanks in part to Neistat’s following on YouTube, Beme was well-received when it first launched last year. However, with the heavy competition from Snapchat, and now Instagram which has incorporated Snapchat-esque features, Beme ultimately couldn’t keep up.
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Source: Ars Technica – CNN buys YouTuber Casey Neistat’s company Beme to start extension brand