Animoto Video Service Launches Business Edition

The Amazon-backed video-creation service Animoto is now training its sights on businesses of all sizes, it announced Tuesday.

Animoto's Web-based application takes still images and music chosen by users, analyzes the music and then automatically generates a highly stylized video that changes in time with the tune. The videos can then be embedded in Web pages.

The new offering, Animoto for Business, will cost US$99 per user for three months or $249 per user per year, with unlimited video creation, streaming and downloading. Business customers also get access to commercially licensed music.

Animoto is not quite white-labeling the service, which it is pitching as a lower-cost alternative to video-production outsourcing.

Business-edition videos won't have an Animoto watermark while they play, but a small animation will still appear at the end of videos, according to a FAQ page.

Animoto is going to market with a range of case studies from initial commercial customers. They range from individuals such as Herman Chan, a Bay Area, California real estate agent, to larger organizations such as the Indianapolis Star newspaper.

Chan is using the service to showcase homes for sale on his Web site, while the newspaper's reporters are creating videos from news photographs.