Flip Video

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

~ the last words ~

the flip was a pocket camcorder for a window of about three years between the death of the camcorder and the camera phone becoming good enough. it shipped in may 2006 from a san francisco startup called pure digital. one button and a usb arm that folded out of the side. two hours of vga video that uploaded straight to youtube.

i did not buy one and very few people in turkey did. flip was a us retail product distributed through best buy and target, and its peak years (2007-2010) overlap exactly with the years my phone got useful for video. by the time it would have been on the shelves of an istanbul electronics chain, the iphone 4 was already in the country and shooting 720p.

cisco bought pure digital in may 2009 for $590 million in stock. it was one of the more straightforward consumer-acquisition graves of the post-2008 decade. cisco was a routers-and-switches company that decided to be a consumer brand, and the flip was the consumer brand they paid for. less than two years later the brand was gone.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

the appeal was the lack of features. point-and-shoot cameras for video had menus and submenus you had to climb through to start a recording. the flip had one record button and a usb plug. you handed it to a kid at a birthday party and a kid could use it. the ultra and mino lines covered the 2007-2009 window where everybody figured out that pocket video was a category and youtube wanted as much as it could get.

~ the fall ~

the iphone 3gs added video in june 2009, a few weeks after the cisco deal closed. by christmas 2010 every smartphone shot 720p and you already carried it everywhere. cisco's april 12 2011 announcement to "exit aspects of its consumer business" was the official call but the death certificate had been signed by hardware that was not built to compete with the flip and ate its market anyway.

~ the long tail ~

there are flip videos still online from 2008 weddings and the very early youtube vlog era. they have a specific compression artifact you can recognize: 640x480 video at 30 frames per second with audio that picks up wind. it is the visual texture of a brief moment when video on the internet was just barely possible from a normal person's pocket. cisco shut the factory down and the format remained as a watermark on a few years of memory.

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