Ptch

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

~ the last words ~

the first time i heard the name ptch was in the marissa-mayer acquisition-list retrospectives that started running in 2016. yahoo had bought about fifty companies in three years and killed most of them, and ptch had been near the top of the wave. the app itself had a fourteen month life, launched november 2012 and dark by january 2014.

it came out of an unusual place. ed leonard, the cto of dreamworks animation, spun the project up inside dreamworks with hans ku and a team of about twenty people. roughly a third were dreamworks staff and the rest came from yahoo and myspace, which is a hiring mix that already tells you something about the pitch. the product was a mobile video remixer. record clips, cut in music beds, layer effects, hand the raw clips to friends so they could re-cut and remix further. dreamworks incubated it, then leonard took the ceo seat when it left the parent.

by then i was thirty on a nexus device in ankara, watching vine clips share over turkish social media without a native remixer culture attached. the app was ios-first and pitched at a US collaborative-video market that was competing with vine and instagram for the same six seconds of attention. it never found the surface.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

ptch shipped november 2012 as an iphone app with an android beta trailing behind. the interface let you drag clips into a timeline and drop in one of the licensed music tracks. export went to the app's own feed or to facebook. the collaborative half was the part that was supposed to matter. one user would upload the raw clips, another would re-edit them, and the result would carry credit for the original source. this was the mid-vine era. instagram had just added video in june 2013.

the traction never arrived. reviewers liked the interface but did not open it again a week later, and by autumn 2013 the founding team was shopping the company.

~ the acquisition ~

on 3 december 2013 yahoo announced the deal. the terms were undisclosed and the whole thing was framed as an acqui-hire from the start. the language in the yahoo statement was that ptch's technology would go into yahoo's photo and video platforms, which was the euphemism yahoo used for burying most of what it bought under marissa mayer.

the shutdown notice came the same week. users had thirty days to export their remixes before the servers went off. on 2 january 2014 the app stopped talking to its backend and ptch was gone as a product.

~ the funny part ~

ptch's technology was supposed to make yahoo's photo and video platforms the best in the world. within about eighteen months of the acquisition, flickr's own video editor had barely moved and yahoo's mobile video products were still a series of experiments that would not survive the verizon sale in 2017. ed leonard and hans ku both moved on inside a couple of years.

what i can say honestly is that ptch was the kind of purchase that made sense on paper for a company that had decided to buy its way into mobile video, and made almost no sense for a product that had spent a year failing to find its audience. thirty days from announcement to shutdown is a pattern yahoo repeated across most of that acquisition batch. by that i mean it was less an acquisition than a soft off-switch.

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