Clinch’s iOS app transforms your videos into rich experience summaries

Clinch‘s social video editor is now available in the App Store, the New York-based startup has announced. While it is only launching publicly today, this iOS app has been in the works for the past few months.

The main purpose of Clinch is to create enhanced video experiences, its CEO and co-founder Oz Etzioni told us a few months ago when we met him at TC Disrupt in New York.

In practical terms, it means that its app combines videos, pictures and content from multiple sources, based on location and time. As you may have guessed, this could become an interesting tool to create collaborative video clips during all sorts of public gatherings.

More importantly, we are talking about rich content that can go beyond a simple multi-angle shooting. As a matter of fact, Clinch doesn’t simply rely on video sequences and images from multiple individuals; thanks to third-party APIs, it is also able to insert relevant maps, Instagram pictures, panoramic views and many other types of content.

Here’s a short video that summarizes Clinch’s concept:

As you can see, Clinch’s team focused on creating a simple and intuitive UI, which means that most of the process is automated. “Our main goal was to make the process as easy and fast as possible for the user, while getting the info we need to produce a great movie,” Etzioni says.

All you have to do to get started is to upload content and define the number and type of participants and viewers – yourself only, a pre-set ‘crew’ of friends or everyone. Live events aside, it’s worth noting that Clinch also works with old videos you were already keeping in your iPhone’s camera roll.

Based on these criteria, Clinch’s algorithms automatically pull third-party content that is relevant for your video, while editing merged sequences to create your final result – which the startup likes to call an “experience summary.”

While Clinch reminds us of the Chilean video crowdsourcing startup Hadza, which stopped operating after a few months, its freemium business model seems more straightforward – it plans to introduce free and paid in-app ‘Movie Themes,’ while charging tiered subscriptions for extra features, such as HD. Yet, it also plans to target the corporate segment Hadza was eyeing, by creating branded, location-based templates for advertisers, event sponsors and venues.

On a higher level, Clinch is a good example of Israel’s capacity to generate startups – Etzioni and his CTO Raz Peter served together as commanders and officers in the Israeli Air Force, before joining the IT industry.

Despite the similarities between them, their backgrounds are also complementary; Etzioni specializes in product design and management, UX & UI design, while Peter’s fields of expertise range from software engineering, algorithms and system engineering to architecture and visual design.

Clinch’s founders also enlisted two early supporters – Israeli serial entrepreneur Amit Bohensky, who invested in Clinch and sits on its board, and social media guru Jeff Pulver, who will advise the startup on its strategy.

➤ Clinch, via the App Store

Image credit: Braden Kowitz