Finding and sharing specific moments in videos just got a little easier. A new video search startup called Yarn lets users search for clips from their favorite movies, TV shows, and music videos and share them with friends or family.
Founded in 2015 by friends Chris Butler and Jeffrey Krause, Yarn is currently available for desktop and on the Facebook Messenger app. On the app’s site, users can search for their favorite lyrics or quotes from movies, TV shows, and music videos and share the resulting clips on social sites like Twitter and Pinterest. Yarn’s newly-launched mobile app takes sharing clips one step farther. Through the Yarn app, users can search for video clips and then tap a button to send them to Messenger conversations. They can also search for clips to replace their emoticons, like using a clip from Beyonce’s “Halo” track instead of the emoji of a smiley face with a halo.
Yarn was born out of Butler and Krause’s dislike of current video search technologies. The two business partners, who each held previous positions at Intel, have worked on media-related apps and products in the past, but video search was always a flawed area Butler and Krause wanted to improve. As such, the two looked to YouTube and start working on Yarn’s tech, which utilizes AI programs, user interactions, and user demographics to help pinpoint talkable moments in video.
“YouTube is part of our inspiration to build the tool. It’s very hard to find specific moments in time in YouTube clips… scrubbing is just not fun, at least for us,” said Butler, as reported by TechCrunch. “And while there are some videos that are short, the vast majority are long – and by long, I mean longer than 15-30 seconds. Try finding a specific quote inside Donald Trump’s candidacy announcement, for example. We wanted to be able to look very precisely at what moments users discovered and treasured, what they skipped over, what they liked, and have precision on clips to hundredths of a second.”
In the future, Butler hopes Yarn can partner with businesses and platforms beyond Facebook Messenger who’d like to improve their reach through video search functions. For example, Butler says Yarn’s clips can act “more like advertisements” for content companies to help direct internet users back to those companies’ sites or original sources. Yarn currently has a political version of its app in private beta, as well as a few partners on board who use Yarn’s tech to search through and categorize their own video content.
You can learn more about Yarn on the app’s site, or download Yarn via the iTunes App Store or Google Play.
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