New Flip Software to Include iPhone Compatibility and "Flip Channels"

June 16, 2009 – The incredibly popular Flip series of budget camcorders will now ship with new software, including a Flip Channels feature for sharing videos with groups of friends and a new iPhone application for viewing Flip Channels. The Flip has long dominated the budget camcorder market with its incredibly compact design and simple user interface. For some users, the built-in software is central to the Flip's allure. The addition of Flip Channels and the new iPhone app may strengthen that appeal even more.

The most significant new feature is "Flip Channels," which loosely emulates the kind of channel feature you might find on YouTube. Using the Flip Video software, you can create a user for any valid email address. Each email address can have numerous channels, shared with different people. These channels are hosted on the FlipShare website.

Though the name may suggest a similarity to YouTube, there is one key difference: videos on FlipShare can only be shared privately with the friends and family members you choose. Channel owners enter the email addresses of those they would like to view their channels, while YouTube channels can be browsed publicly. Subscribers to YouTube channels are self-selected; Flip Channels are invitation-only. There has not yet been any announcement of public Flip Channels.
 

To share a video, select a user, channel, and the people you want
to share it with. You can also create a new user or channel.

Although the concept is quite simple, the new feature is somewhat unintuitive, thanks to a jumbled lexicon. The name "Flip Channels" is deceptive, since there are no subscribers, only those with whom the videos are shared. And even if you are the one to create a channel, you have to share the channel with yourself in order to view it when you log in to the FlipShare site. Furthermore, there's no clear sense of usernames or ownership; instead, the channels are organized around "sender addresses."

When you log into the FlipShare site, you can see all your shared channels.

As long as you always use the same email address, however, logging into Flip Share will allow you to view your private channel ("My Channel"), any share channels you've created (as long as you remembered to share them with yourself), and any channels that others have shared with you. Unfortunately, your login will not grant you access to videos that have been emailed to you through the Flip Video email feature.

To promote its new Flip Channels feature, Pure Digital has partnered with Apple to bring a FlipShare application to the iPhone. This free app will give you easy access to your FlipShare account, including any videos in your private channel. Flip Video has not been upgraded to include an export feature for iPhones: your iPhone will not appear as a device in the Flip Video software, nor is there an option for resizing for iPhone, such as you find in iMovie.

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