Sunnyvale, California — Struggling Internet pioneer Yahoo, ditched one more of its unfruitful service to overcome the deteriorating economy. Yahoo, of late announced the closure of their Jumpcut online video service, and telling users to head to Flickr for making any new uploads.
In December, Yahoo announced disabled new video uploads, but that they “will be keeping the Jumpcut site up and running for the foreseeable future.” But now the company said that it will be closing the site in about two months.
That is the finesse of new CEO Carol Bartz, who is hard at work axing many of Yahoo’s similarly lagging services.
Hence the shutting down Jumpcut is no surprise. Yahoo, with its own financial issues compounded by the recession, is under pressure to cut expenses. She has reportedly been preparing plans to sell off Yahoo’s lackluster HotJobs employment listing service, for example.
And there will surely be more to come, from the many companies Yahoo has gobbled up in the last few years and has done nothing much with. Also, it is extracting a $120 million by disposing of its stake in South Korean e-commerce company Gmarket and could announce a new round of layoffs when it reports first-quarter financial results Tuesday.
The sassy video editing service, which Yahoo acquired in 2006 amid high hopes of the Internet giant becoming a big player in the hot online video market.
Jumpcut allows users to upload and share videos, in addition it also combines them into larger works. This option is still available for existing videos, but people’s remixed videos can not be downloaded.
Now, Jumpcut is a wrap.
Apparently the foreseeable future ends in June, when the site will be shut down. Thus, Jumpcut sent this note to its customers:
Dear Jumpcut user,
“After careful consideration, we will be officially closing the Jumpcut.com site on June 15, 2009,” a note on the site says. “This was a difficult decision to make, but it is part of the ongoing prioritization efforts at Yahoo.”
“Very soon, we will be bringing out a software utility that will allow you to download the movies you created on Jumpcut to your computer. We will send instructions to the email address on your Jumpcut account when the download utility is available,” the company said.
Once you download your movies, you may choose to upload them to another site such as Flickr, which now allows video uploads. You can find out more here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/video/
Thanks for your understanding and thanks for being a part of Jumpcut.
The Jumpcut Team
Curiously, Yahoo is making users download the videos to their computers, and then suggests they upload them to another Yahoo property, Flickr, which now allows video.