eyeSpot

» see eyespot.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

in 2006 i was a university student watching video the way everyone did by then, on youtube, in a browser tab. eyespot was a us tool for a different verb. not watch but remix. it let you pull clips together, lay music under them, and hand the result off somewhere, all inside the browser, which in 2006 still felt like a stunt.

jim kaskade and david dudas built it in san diego and opened a public beta in april 2006. that october it raised about three point seven million dollars. the pitch was mashups, take footage you had and cut it against someone else's with music underneath, and it even ran a mobile piece that shuttled video between the site and a phone back when that was hard. it signed one-click publishing deals so you could push a finished mix straight to blip.tv or veoh.

it was an american early-adopter tool and i was not its user. my video was something i watched, not something i cut, and the browser editing that eyespot was proud of did not become part of my life until youtube absorbed the idea years later. eyespot got there first and paid the usual price for being first, it did the hard engineering and someone bigger got the habit.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

for a stretch eyespot had the partnerships that make a startup look real, deals with lionsgate and current tv, plus the video-sharing sites that wanted an editor bolted onto them. the technology was legitimately hard, decoding and recombining video in a browser in 2006 was not a small thing, and the company had over a hundred thousand users trying it. the trouble was that mixing video was a hobby for a few and a chore for most.

~ the long tail ~

the money ran out the way it did for most 2006 video startups, the audience for making video was tiny next to the audience for watching it. a company called sightly bought eyespot on december 19, 2008 and the service wound down. the founders moved on, jim kaskade into a long career in enterprise tech. the browser video editor did not die with eyespot, though, it just waited for youtube and later the phone apps to make it something a normal person would actually touch.

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