Giphy is again moving beyond the traditional confines of everyone’s favorite animated image format, the GIF. The company is soft launching its video platform Friday, which showcases the 118 finalist videos from the first Giphy Film Fest, held earlier this week.
The Film Fest videos slot into various categories, including narrative, stop-motion, animated and experimental. All of the entrants had 18 seconds to tell their stories, but the time constraint on Giphy’s video platform is a little more relaxed — it hosts videos lasting up to 30 seconds. As with Vine (and, of course, GIFs), you can loop the videos.
Giphy said in a release that the platform is a “foray into yet another media format that we believe can tell powerful, short-form stories.” and says it wants to be the go-to destination for short-form content. However, it faces some stern competition, not least because one of Vine’s co-founders this week announced Byte, a looping video platform that will launch in spring 2019.
Source: Giphy
