Stupeflix – API Enabled Online Video

• development
• startups

Online video is something that helps to make a product or website standout from the rest. Whether it is a screencast tutorial or a promotional video for a product, the presence of video can help your offering stand-out from the crowd.

Stupeflix is a site that enables you to automatically generate video from a series of images, and apply text and a backing track to make a video that is quite compelling. In the past I have used Animoto and recommended it to friends as a great and simple way to put together a great video from existing static images. Honestly, I will continue to recommend Animoto as an excellent tool for generating video online – the effects and overall feel of the video coming out of Animoto has an edge over the end product Stupeflix creates (you can do a side-by-side comparison of their demo videos and you’ll see what I mean).

What makes Stupeflix different, however, is that it exposes a RESTful API for generating the videos. This in turn opens up some amazing opportunities for websites that already have a large amount of static imagery they would like to present in a more compelling way. Mike Butcher in his techcrunch post suggests a few application possibilities around generic eCommerce sites which includes some potential uses of the generated videos to assist with monetization of your own sites.

One of the most useful real-world examples I can think of would be on property sales / real estate websites. Nothing would showcase a property better than a video of the still images taken by the property photographer. It would certainly be more compelling than the clunking slideshow mechanisms most of these sites currently offer. The same of course could apply to car sales sites and the like.

Image hosting and stock image sites are another obvious big area that could put Stupeflix to good use. So the next thing to do is to get some time get mashing with their API (I’ll post any updates on this post).