Public Access - Can Hype Succeed Where Vine Failed?

The fall of Vine means there is now a gap in the marketplace, and new video streaming app Hype, made by Vine's original co-creators, wants to be the app to fill the role.

Unfortunately, the new video app seems to have little of the appeal carried by Vine.

The original short video app, which Twitter recently announced it was shutting down, allows users to record carefully orchestrated six-second clips that could loop endlessly, allowing creative content makers to garner over 200 million monthly viewers and over 39 million videos. Popular users made videos with elaborate plots, sets and character relationships.

While no official closing date has been announced, Twitter did release a statement saying it would close "in the next several months," allowing content makers time to download their material and transfer their accounts and followers to some other social media service.

So if Hype was made by the same people as Vine, why can't it meet the same needs?

For starters, Hype is structured around livestreaming. The service doesn't allow for the elaborately planned, carefully edited pieces published on Vine, instead limiting content creators to what they can physically accomplish in real time. Although users can manipulate the screen as they stream videos, they won't have any of the powerful editing tools that Vine came with.

In addition, the features of the app in general appear to more closely resemble livestreaming features offered by Facebook, rather than Vine's format.

An emphasis on live user interaction makes Hype less of a content producing website and more of a social media website for personalities to interact with fans. Although useful for those with an established following, the format is more well-suited to celebrities than users attempting to create entertainment media.

Livestreaming videos also means content will be less easily shareable, which was part of the original appeal of Vine. "It began with unlimited time," said creator Don Hoffman in 2013. "But when we saw our friends trying to share their videos over text message, we realized that it needed a social component—and that meant we needed to make it quick to share and view."

The lack of shareable content on Hype may make it less quick to catch on, unlike Vine videos, which could be shared and played with those who haven't downloaded the app first, giving them a chance to convince users the app has worthwhile content worth joining to check out.

Of course, Vine seemed equally unusable when it first came out, but in time the app became a sort of condensed YouTube, attracting content creators with similar goals and encouraging a similar relationship of primarily random commenters, rather than friends, to engage with other accounts.

What Hype offers is certainly not new. Snapchat's story option allows its users to do something similar to livestreaming, and Facebook and Tumblr both carry live streaming features today. Services for livestreaming exist in abundance on the internet.

However this social media app, centered entirely on live streaming services, still has to prove its worth before former Vine users will jump on board.