CNN snaps up Casey Neistat's video sharing app Beme
"How do you do, fellow kids?"
In the hopes of bringing in a younger audience, CNN has acquired the social video sharing app Beme, which was most notably the brainchild of YouTube star Casey Neistat. Beme, which let you quickly shoot and upload four-second videos, will be shut down, the New York Times reports. Neistat and the app's 12 other employees will be working on a new project for CNN which will debut sometime next year. While the app only received around 1.2 million downloads, the deal mostly seems to be a way for CNN to bring Neistat aboard, a successful YouTube personality who's managed to cultivate a desirable millennial viewership.
"By joining forces with CNN, we're able to give our mission more than just one, startup-budgeted shot," Beme CTO and co-founder Matt Hackett wrote in a blog post. "We are going to hunker down and create something new. To do that with the full focus it deserves, we have to say goodbye to Beme."
Beme started out as a Snapchat competitor with a unique hook: Instead of holding your phone up to take videos, you just need it to your chest. The app would then shoot a four-second video clip and upload it to your followers, without any fiddling on your part. It was an attempt to make video sharing even easier than Snapchat, but Beme failed to find much traction beyond Neistat's faithful followers. While it's unclear what Neistat's CNN project would be, I wouldn't be surprised to see his team working on an app for the network's iReport citizen journalism initiative.
