Yahoo hammers final nail in Jumpcut coffin
In December, Yahoo all but killed its Jumpcut online video site by disabling new uploads and telling users to head to Flickr. Now the company said it's closing the site altogether in two months.
"After careful consideration, we will be officially closing the Jumpcut.com site on June 15, 2009," a note on the site says. "This was a difficult decision to make, but it's part of the ongoing prioritization efforts at Yahoo."
The closure is no surprise. Yahoo, with its own financial issues compounded by the recession, is under pressure to cut expenses. It's getting a $120 million infusion by selling its stake in South Korean e-commerce company Gmarket and could announce a new round of layoffs when it reports first-quarter financial results Tuesday.
Jumpcut let people upload and share videos, but also combine them into larger works. This option is still available for existing videos, but people's remixed videos can't be downloaded.
In December, Yahoo had said it would keep the site available "for the foreseeable future." Now it's telling people they'll have to retrieve their videos if they want to keep them.
"Very soon, we'll be releasing a software utility that will allow you to download the movies you created on Jumpcut to your computer. We'll send instructions to the email address on your Jumpcut account when the download utility is available," the company said.
Via All Things D
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank. 
If I told you that I had NO clue about that "Jumpcut" as a person having my.yahoo as start page since 1998, would you believe? Even more interestingly, my business is video.
Does the new boss of Yahoo question such "inventions" and search for who had the marvellous idea of competing the established services instead of enhancing your own established services like Mail?
I mean they keep firing people... Such "geniuses" should be the ones to go.
Videoman, online video editing will happen. Even grid-like technologies will make today's "transcoding, wait" look like stone age and average user may apply Lucas quality fx but there isn't enough upstream bandwidth for average consumer yet.
There isn't even standard for online storage, privacy.