Cuts

Dear Cuts Users,

I am writing to announce that the Cuts service has been acquired by Rifftrax (http://rifftrax.com/).

Since the day we launched, the Rifftrax community has all but taken over our site and shown a seriously strong interest in our tools. Its not too surprising given that the roots of Rifftrax was the popular Comedy Central TV show, Mystery Science Theater 3000. The combination of Cuts - the easiest way to add your take to online video and Rifftrax should be an entertaining mix. The community clearly has something to say and a knack for leveraging our tools to create fun new video experiences.

Rifftrax will continue to operate the Cuts.com service and has exciting plans for many feature enhancements, including the ability for users to actually riff on videos with Mike Nelson, by combining their voices with Mike’s in a Cuts powered experience.

I want to thank the Cuts team for all their hard work this past year. It has been an amazing journey with a great group of people!!!! I also want to thank our investors and the board for their support and direction.

Cheers,

Evan Krauss
President & CEO, Cuts, Inc.

This week’s winner takes us back to controversial time in the history of music, the 80s. In terms of respect, very few have no opinion — some love what the decade produced, while others really can’t stand it. What’s your take?

Any music videos you really love or hate — Cut ‘em, make us laugh, and win a prize (an iPod).

Interestingly enough, Billy Squier, the star of this week’s winning cut, saw his popularity plummet after the release of this video. “Rock Me Tonite” was universally derided by his fans for its effeminate set (a bedroom dressed in soft, pastel fabrics) and Squier’s bizarre, vaguely homoerotic prancing and ripping of his clothing, reminiscent of Jennifer Beals’ performance in the film “Flashdance” (source: Wikipedia).

In classic Rifftrax style, this week’s winning Cut pours more (funny) salt on the wound. So check out what proved to be the last big hurrah for Billy and hopefully the first of many funny Cuts from Naitch (this week’s Top Cutter).

As you have probably noticed too, more and more Cuts are coming from places outside the USA. In fact almost half of our traffic originates from far away places like China, India, France, Germany, U.K., Spain, Italy, as well as Nepal, Zaire, El Salvador, Iran, and Iraq. Its really interesting how the video content brought to Cuts varies by place, while at the same time appreciating that clips we find funny here, are also funny there. Case in point is this week’s winner, which took the Simpsons and Cut it German style. Enjoy.

As we see more and more non-English Cuts, we better appreciate the need to provide some basic translation tools. Other initiatives will roll out first (i.e. mashups and publishing, as discussed in previous post), but soon thereafter we will focus on useful enhancements such as this. Stay tuned and safe cutting.

This week’s winner has been a contender since we started the Top Cutter contest. It’s a very funny “translation” of the Finnish translation of a Disney cartoon, and has been a crowd favorite since its initial submission. Enjoy the winning Cut (we certainly have) …

A little DuckTales “did you know”…
It was the first American animated TV series to be officially broadcast in syndication in the former USSR, and as a result of its success both here and abroad, the show was translated into many languages including: Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish.

Given the fun this week’s winner had with the Finnish version, would be great to see someone take a different translation and create another Top Cut.

Congratulations to theonetheonlybruce (this week’s Top Cutter) – we look forward to seeing more from you and the rest of the Cutter community.

If you have any feedback on the service or the contest, please let me know.

Here at Cuts our goal is to build the best video editing experience that you want. Since we launched, many have offered thoughts and perspective on what would make Cuts better. Some great ideas have been shared, but two key themes are clearly on your collective Cuts wish list…

* You want better ways to share/publish your Cut
* You want to mashup multiple videos into the same Cut

To both these points, let me briefly expand on two new features coming soon…

Sharing/Publishing
Today we make it easy for anyone to watch any Cut via the Cuts Directory, and for you to embed a Cut on your MySpace/blog or email it to your friends. Our next step is to help you publish your Cut back to the video sites that you and your friends use every day. As such, in addition to existing share options, soon you will be able to download your Cut (video with edits included) and post it to YouTube, MySpace, and the other popular hosting sites. This way, more people can see your Cut, and with just a few clicks they can come back to Cuts.com, make their own version of what they saw, and share that right back.

Mashup/Remix
Clearly Cuts gives you many ways to show the world how funny and creative you can be. But wouldn’t it be great if you could take the best of two, three, or even more videos and blend your favorite scenes together in whatever way you wanted? Yes it would!! Enabling mashups has been on our roadmap since day 1 and to make it happen we have spent lots of time working out the technical issues. Good progress has been made and the functionality is now in flight. These features will roll out with the next major release of the Cutmaker, which will come soon after we push the publishing enhancements discussed above. And don’t worry — it will still be the easiest way to add captions, sounds, loops, and (soon) other video clips.

Next steps for us don’t just stop here, we are also tackling many other improvements including the nuts and bolts of knocking down bugs and enhancing the speed and performance of the Cuts experience. We will post a poll soon to get your thoughts around the relative priority for the next set of new features, so stay tuned. And please continue to share any thoughts around other areas that we should address via our feedback link.

Enjoy your day.

The Top Cutter contest had another great week and the competition was tight. All week the leader board kept changing as numerous new Cuts, funny “Rifftrax” inspired Cuts, quality offerings from the sXePhil faithful, and various contenders from the previous week all battled for first place. Congrats to this week’s top cutter (palehorse864) and the top Cut “Metropolis”, check it out…

For those keeping score @ home this week’s final leader board looked like this…

1) Metropolis
2) Ducktails introduction
3) Gravy by Barls Narkly
4) sXe Phil’s perfect woman!
5) Miss PreOp Brazil 2007!
6) SXEPHIL is kinda needy…
7) Care of the Skin
8) Hippo and Dog
9) i cutt sxephil today!!!

Look again this week for additional tweaks to our ranking methodology – as always please send me any feedback on the contest or any other thoughts via our feedback link.

Thanks to all who participated in our first of many – 9 to be exact – weekly Top Cutter contests. Many great Cuts from all over the globe were submitted and we are excited to see what happens in the coming weeks. Check out the contest page to see this week’s leader board and learn more.

A key tenant of the contest is that the Cut’s community should pick the top cut – and we are happy to announce that “Rude’s Hiaku Van Rifftrax Cut!” (by Cutter Rude) is our first week’s winner. The Cut is a funny and creative translation of a foreign film, check it out…

Last week, we noticed that the rating for a number of Cuts were being inflated (or deflated) by individuals voting many many times (some in excess of 100 votes). As this goes against the spirit of the competition, we pulled those Cuts from last week’s contest and will reenter them this week with a clean rating slate; as necessary (hopefully it won’t be) we will repeat this whenever we see similar voting dynamics. To help avoid this situation going forward we are going to adjust our Cut ranking methodology and tweak aspects of our rating experience – look for these throughout the week.

Look forward to seeing more of your Cuts. Please ping me if you have any questions or comments about the Top Cutter contest or the Cuts experience overall.

Stephen
VP Product

Thank you “early beta testers” for helping us test Cuts before going live. We have received fantastic input and ideas from many of you and it has helped us prepare for our public beta that launched today.

We made a number of visual enhancements, cleaned up some pesky issues, and added your ability to start making Cuts easily from Goggle videos (in addition to MySpace and YouTube).

We hope you enjoy the enhancements.

The Cuts Team

PS> Our “Cut It” tool simplifies the process of bringing a video to Cuts.

You can get it HERE. (See tip at the bottom of the page)

The next time you are on the page of a video you want just click the “Cut It” bookmarklet, it will automatically bring you and the video to Cuts.

Since our beta launch we have been getting really positive responses from our early users, the press and some great bloggers. The one question or point many are raising is “how are all these new video services different”. We feel there are a lot of great companies out there all with their own benefits and issues – however we feel Cuts is rather unique. I have been struggling with the easiest way to explain it frankly and thanks to my son this weekend I finally figured it out.

Yo-Yo’s, Lego’s, and Model Trains. I was playing Lego’s with my son Saturday morning and was surprised at how my son has evolved with the toy. He is almost 4 now and can do relatively amazing things with these blocks. He built a small garage today for his rocket and I was reminded of some of the incredible buildinga and scenes we saw at Lego Land. These things are incredibly versatile, you can play for 5 mins and make something simple or 5 days and create something memorable. And that’s when it hit me – Cuts is like Lego’s.

On the far right extreme of the toy spectrum you have Model Trains. They are very expensive, require 100’s of hours to get started and even more maintaining. The people who engage with model trains LOVE THEM. You have too or it’s not worth it. On the other end of the spectrum you have Yoyo’s. They are cheap, easy to get, and you can pick up the basic gist in a few minutes. Few become “extreme users” and can do miraculous tricks with them, but most get bored in a day or tw. Both of these toys deliver healthy returns or they wouldn’t have lasted for generations – but they are relatively small markets. On the other hand, we have had lego’s in my house since my son was under two and everyone I know has them. Everyone I know played with them in their youth.

So, on the left in the Yoyo camp you have the caption/overlay services. They are easy to use and pretty cool but have a limited feature set and I suspect people will get bored rather quickly. On the extreme right you have the movie-makers. They are also cool services but the time investment is high and there is definitely a learning curve.

With Cuts you can keep it simple, just add captions, add a couple sound effects and move on in 5 mins. Or you can spend 30 mins and get fancy with skipping and looping scenes. You don’t have to upload video (which can take 30 mins alone), you don’t have to download software, and you don’t have to know anything about editing video.

Even our more advanced editing & mash up tools coming out a few months are designed to help you get started in seconds and are easy to use. It is also worth calling out [though it doesn’t fit the analogy] that all Cuts are re-Cutable. Today anyone can take a Cut someone made and add their point of view or start from scratch with the same video. This lowers the barrier to entry to get started. This feature will also hold true with mashups.

Early indicators are this was the right approach but it’s too soon to tell who will win for sure. But with 200MM videos watched online in December and more users engaging every day there is clearly room for a few winners. Only question is who’s mix of services, marketing, and approach will interest the largest group. We hope - its Cuts of course

Well we are out in all our glory .

We have had thousands of people from all over the world interacting with service since last night and its so exciting. Watching the Cuts people have made and reading the feedback has been amazing. Thank you everyone for helping us test the service.

A lot of people have asked about new features, offered ideas, and made suggestions for improvements. I cannot be specific about all the new features and fixes but I can say we are working on fixing a few bugs and addressing the areas that most of you said was important - as we prep for our launch. So please keep the feedback coming.

Oh and one more thing - YES we will have mash-ups soon.