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Yahoo idles Jumpcut, steers video users to Flickr

Economic pressures lead the Internet pioneer to direct online video users to its Flickr site. For video editing at least, Yahoo forsakes the cloud.

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Stephen Shankland
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Jumpcut let people upload, combine, and share videos.
Jumpcut let people upload, combine, and share videos. Now it's in maintenance mode. Yahoo

Yahoo's belt-tightening has led the company to shut down new uploads to its Jumpcut service for sharing and combining videos, steering people instead to its Flickr service.

"We're sorry to announce that we are no longer accepting uploads to Jumpcut," a note on the site said Wednesday. "It was a difficult decision that we wish we didn't have to make, but it was necessary in order to focus resources on other Yahoo sites."

Jumpcut now steers users to Yahoo's photo-sharing site Flickr, which got video abilities earlier this year. Jumpcut won't be shut down, and existing videos won't be deleted, but without the ability to upload new videos, it's clear the site doesn't have a shining future before it.

Yahoo acquired Jumpcut in 2006, but the service never made it out of beta testing.

Yahoo laid off 1,520 employees last week and is in the midst of a review of all its business units to see which should be preserved. The company is under fierce financial pressure that only got worse with the recession and increasingly gloomy forecasts for online advertising.

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.

"Jumpcut was built to assemble your movies in real-time so you wouldn't have to wait for rendering. The flip-side of this design means there's no single 'file to download,'" the site said. "There are third-party tools like http://www.clipnabber.com that you can use to get a partial download of your Jumpcut movies in .flv format, but the files created won't include any titles, transitions or effects that you added using the Jumpcut editor."

For video editing, the site steered people away from the cloud toward PC-based applications: Windows Movie Maker and Apple's iMovie.

(Via TechCrunch.)