Unearth the Video History of a Location with Vidcinity

It may not exactly be archeology, but the way that Vidcinity allows you to discover videos that were shot in an area reminds me a lot of digging up hidden treasure.

Vidcinity is a video sharing service with “geopinning”. This means that when you shoot and share a video, it’s pinned to the location where it was shot and only people within a mile of the video can see it.

It’s a twist on video sharing that may not sound all that unfamiliar if you follow app news. The difference between Vidcinity [App Store, free] and something like Color, besides the whole video sharing aspect of course, is that the videos aren’t shared from your app itself, but instead exist on Vidcinity’s servers and in that physical place, forever.

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This means that you could be standing in line at your favorite local coffee shop, pop open Vidcinity and see video that someone shot and posted of a musical performance there last night. You could then pop open that video and see the exact location it was shot and share it via Facebook with other services like Twitter on the horizon.

This discovery of videos based on physical location is at the heart of the experience that founder Ian Miller wanted to create with Vidcinity.

Miller says that although the app is currently free, they do have plans in place to support it via a baked-in ad network that’s coming in an update that will be submitted to the App Store this week. Companies will initially be able to advertise with a video that is visible within the same 1-mile radius that user videos are limited to. Eventually a larger company with more locations would be able to broadcast within 1 mile of all of them at once.

I tested out the app myself and found the procedure to be simple enough and without any major hitches. The current app is very rough looking but Miller told me that the update that will be submitted Friday will also contain a revamp of the UI to look more like what you currently see on Vidcinity’s site.

If you shoot a video on-site and upload it there, the video will upload in low res form over 3G. Then, when you get back to a spot where you have a WiFi connection, Vidcinity will re-upload the full resolution version. This is a welcomed feature, especially in areas where 3G speed isn’t the best.

Vidcinity’s geopinning uses a built in GPS radio to pin the video to your shooting location. If you shot the video earlier and you had your location services active on your camera app, then you’ll have a location already embedded with the file. Vidcinity will grab this and place it back at the site, also showing you where you are now.

In its current form Vidcinity is a tad raw although the core service works as advertised. With the introduction of the new UI soon and plans for video effects and push notifications when videos are found in your area, Vidcinity seems like it would be a welcome addition to the app bag of any traveler or urban explorer.