Vimeo buys up Cameo

In our opinion there’s a nasty trend in video apps these days and that’s to have little useful functionality and lots of frivolous superficiality. Can we find an shoot-edit-upload app that we actually like? No we can’t, and Cameo doesn’t sway our opinion either.

Fortunately for the people behind it, our opinion matters little at least in video-hosting site Vimeo’s world. They’ve just snapped up the Cameo developers and are bringing the app into the Vimeo world.

If you haven’t tried it, it’s a free video shoot-and-editor for iOS devices (iPad, iPhone etc) that provides a library of template “looks” and music you can add to your video. The completed extravaganza can then be uploaded to Cameo’s own hosting or to a smattering of other sites, Vimeo presumably now included.

It’s stuffed full of the trendy “social” features such as following what other people are doing with the app. The other trendy annoyance – sorry, feature – is that each clip you record can only be up to six seconds long. We still don’t understand why this is popular…

Given the lengths to which members of Vimeo usually go to craft beautiful videos we’re a bit puzzled by the attraction of simplistic film making. But hey, it’s not our money.

More info at http://vimeo.com/blog/post:617