Microsoft buys video-editing platform Clipchamp

Australian in-browser tool to become part of Office 365

Trade

Image: Stockfresh

8 September 2021

Microsoft has announced the acquisition of Clipchamp, an Australian in-browser video-editing platform used by 17 million people worldwide.

Clipchamp will become a part of Office 365, allowing users to create and edit videos using easily manageable tools – demand for which increased significantly during the pandemic.

Commenting on the acquisition, Office media group corporate VP Chris Pratley described Clipchamp as “a natural fit to extend the cloud-powered productivity experiences in Microsoft 365 for individuals, families, schools, and businesses”.

Addressing existing Clipchamp users, Pratley said that “it’s all going to get better with more options, more power, and the easy creation experience you love”.

Microsoft didn’t reveal the financial details of the transaction and didn’t specify when Clipchamp will become available on Office 365. However, a spokesperson for the tech giant told CNBC that it “will have a process to eventually convert existing Clipchamp users/customers to Microsoft subscribers”.

Founded in 2014, Clipchamp is headquartered in Brisbane, Australia, with around 90 employees. In April 2020, the company announced plans to open its first US office in Seattle, 25km away from Microsoft’s main headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Prior to the acquisition, the tech giant had featured Clipchamp in its Insider Preview Build, helping it to significantly grow its customer base.

In July 2021, Clipchamp announced that it had surpassed 17 million registered users across more than 390,000 companies, with a year over year increase of 54%. The achievement was largely credited to the shift to remote working, with office workers turning to video-editing tools to create presentations, training videos, and other corporate communications.

“While social media videos have always been at the forefront of business needs, during the past year we’ve also witnessed the rapid adoption of internal communication use cases where there is a lot of screen and webcam recording taking place in our platform,” Clipchamp CEO Alexander Dreiling said at the time.

“The need for video templates has also accelerated, with templates usage up more than 180% year-on-year, because they allow users with limited video editing skills and time to create a professional-grade video within minutes.”

The heightened demand for video-editing services has led to tech giants choosing to invest, sometimes heavily, in companies offering such tools. Last month, Adobe splashed out $1.276 billion on video collaboration start-up Frame.io, while in September 2020, Oracle took a 12.5% stake in TikTok Global – which Microsoft was also interested in buying.

News of Microsoft’s Clipchamp acquisition comes just weeks after the tech giant announced price increases for its Office 365 subscriptions in a bid to add new “innovations” to the service, including the addition of “unlimited dial-in capabilities for Microsoft Teams meetings” for its enterprise, business, frontline, and government customers.

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