Vimeo has bought Cameo, a video-making app that launched last fall. It’s the second time in the last year that IAC’s video site has acquired a video app.
Vimeo Buys Video-Making App Cameo, a Few Months After Its Debut
It’s Vimeo’s second app buy in the last year.
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
Cameo is supposed to offer easy-to-use video-editing software that lets users create sophisticated effects, including the ability to combine video from multiple cameras. It appeared in Apple’s App Store in October, and earned some plaudits from the App Store’s curators, who gave it a “Best of 2013” award.
Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor isn’t releasing financial details, so it’s easy to assume this is a relatively standard “acqhire” deal, though Trainor says that’s not the case. All 14 of the company’s employees are supposed to go to work at Vimeo, and Trainor says Vimeo will keep running Cameo as a standalone app — just like it did a year ago when it bought Echograph, a GIF-making app.
“This is a case where the product itself is really great, and we’re really excited about it,” he said. “We are absolutely going to be building on it.”
Cameo is the second app to come out of Fast Society, a startup which at one point was in the group messaging business, then pivoted out of that at the end of 2011.* If you include Vimeo’s core app itself, it means Vimeo is now operating three apps which let people capture and share video. The multi-app strategy is becoming increasingly common — see Facebook (Instagram) and Twitter (Vine).
* This is technically an asset acquisition, so there’s still a legal entity called Fast Society out there, but I don’t think there’s anything left beyond that name.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
