Video jour­nal­ism has tak­en a sig­nif­i­cant step toward social and mobile plat­forms fol­low­ing the acqui­si­tion of Clip­ta­mat­ic by NowThisNews.

Social media man­agers who haven’t yet heard of NowThis­News might like to lis­ten up: head­quar­tered in New York, the start­up isn’t yet two years old (its birth­day comes on the 1^st Sep­tem­ber) but it’s been mak­ing sol­id progress in that time in rein­vent­ing dig­i­tal video jour­nal­ism for the social and media age. And it’s just acquired Clip­ta­mat­ic, a plat­form that sim­i­lar­ly helps top-qual­i­ty con­tent own­ers dis­sem­i­nate video in real-time to social media.

Sim­pli­fy­ing video distribution

Cliptamatic’s social feed can also be dropped into con­tent own­ers’ mobile apps and web­sites, enabling tal­ent such as ath­letes, actors and news anchors as well as fans to use those videos in their social activ­i­ties. The can­ny social media man­ag­er will quick­ly spot that this inter­sec­tion of social and mobile video close­ly resem­bles that of NowThis­News, whose pres­i­dent, Sean Mills, said:

“We’ve always felt that the com­pa­ny that’s going to win in that space is going to have DNA that’s not just a con­tent com­pa­ny, and not just a tech com­pa­ny, but both.”

Com­ment­ing on the acqui­si­tion of Clip­ta­mat­ic, he explained that its tech­nol­o­gy plat­form – and its tal­ent team – will not only help NowThis­News sim­pli­fy the process of dis­trib­ut­ing video out to social media (a “very heavy, man­u­al process” accord­ing to Mills) but deliv­er excel­lent ana­lyt­ics, too. The two firms began by exper­i­ment­ing with a part­ner­ship but both began to real­ize that it would just make more sense to bring Cliptamatic’s tech­nol­o­gy in-house.

Fast deliv­ery

The move should now make it a lot faster for NowThis­News to break new sto­ries with video well before tra­di­tion­al media gets up an arti­cle or even a pho­to. The start­up already has some form in doing this, hav­ing shared a video on Twit­ter fea­tur­ing the life­time ban of Don­ald Ster­ling by the NBA 10 min­utes before most oth­er news organ­i­sa­tion had post­ed a pho­to and a full 60 min­utes before they’d post­ed a video.

Mills says:

“There may be new types of rela­tion­ships that we have, but we’re very focused on one thing which is…becoming a dig­i­tal news­room for brands, and this tech­nol­o­gy gives us a strate­gic advan­tage to help us do that.”