Socialcam CEO on the Future of Video

July 13th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

Jeff Barrett is co-founder of , a 2011 PRNewswire winner for Best Use Of Video In Social Media. Follow him

Much like in 2011, is achieving an unpredicted and unmistakable rise to prominence in 2012, with more than 75 million users and a recent partnership with to cover the Summer Olympic games.

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Of course, for CEO Michael Seibel, video is not a new medium. He spent five years overseeing strategy and business development at as its co-founder and CEO. In that time it grew to 30 million unique visitors each month. Socialcam, his newest creation, is an easy way to make and share videos via a smartphone. We recently spoke to Seibel about video, competition, and the future of his company.

1. What did you learn from Justin.tv that you have applied to Socialcam?

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Above all else, do not be intimidated by video. It’s expensive, hard to scale, hard to minimize. We had to confront all three at Justin.tv.

I didn’t go into Socialcam feeling like those would be challenges. There’s a confidence having been through it before and having built a video company to scale.

2. What makes Socialcam unique?

You now have a camera 24 hours a day. We want to encourage people to [use it to] share content and form relationships via real-world connections. Socialcam is relationship-based.

3. How do you see shared video evolving in the next year?

I think that social video is making video creation an industry. Consuming content will now mean consuming videos from friends.

4. Then how is Socialcam different from an app like , and do you see Viddy as competition?

There are three significant differences with other apps in the social video space. First is video length. We are the only app that lets you take videos of unlimited length. We get so many users that tell us they switched because they want longer video. The average video is sixty to ninety seconds. Second it’s customizable. There are thirty different effects per playlist. It enhances the replay because no two videos look the same.

Last is scale. Socialcam has more than 75 million users. We are between three and four times bigger than the next biggest competitor. More than 13 million users have the app installed. What’s most interesting to me is that 14% of the app user base uses it every day.

Length, customization, scale. That’s what sets us apart.

5. Even people that like have said that Socialcam is low brow. Is Socialcam low brow?

We are talking about videos people create. We don’t curate a list of videos. Do I imagine a first time video creator is going to create something like a featured YouTube user? No. We are just happy that people are creating videos. We’re not going to judge.

6. The Socialcam app allows for seamless posting to a user’s Facebook page. Do you think we should be posting everything we check out on Socialcam?

This is an option we make clear to users and let them decide. Social mode is turned off by 20% of users. It’s an extremely powerful tool. It automates what happens naturally with a viral video. Yet, it’s certainly not for everyone.

7. A lot of the Socialcam videos are colorful and many are personal. How do you respond to critics who think there has to be a line when it comes to what we share online and that companies like Socialcam allow people to constantly cross it?

Users should decide what they share and what they shouldn’t. You won’t be able to find bad stuff on Socialcam. There is community monitoring in place. We are also building a system for automatically scanning and removing bad content. Two other things also help with that. The vast majority [of Socialcam] accounts are Facebook connected and [users] don’t want to attach bad content to their profiles. Second, [the video] comes from your own phone. Those two drastically limit bad content.

8. What’s next for Socialcam?

[In the last few months] we have built two new versions of the app. We scaled from 15 to 120 servers. We are now a Top 150 website in the U.S. and just launched new functionality on our website.

The next month who knows. A lot of people have experienced Socialcam second hand or via Facebook. Our goal is to continue to introduce them to Socialcam and then introduce them to creative video.

Video is the most powerful form of social media. It is our challenge to harness these users and show them how powerful it is. What excites me [is that I] recently looked back at the last year of videos I created. I thought, “How powerful will it be to look back at all of these videos, what I can remember when I’m older, what I can show my kids. Not just tell a story, but share a story.”

This story originally published on Mashable .