Byte: Vine creator to launch new video-looping app

A follow-up to Vine has been announced, two years after the six-second video app was shut down by Twitter.

Byte will be a similar app to Vine, which helped launch the careers of stars including Shawn Mendes and Logan Paul.

After Vine ended, those stars moved to its rivals Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube.

Dom Hofmann – who co-founded Vine along with Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll – said his new app would launch next spring.

Looping six-second long videos is a pretty simple idea, but Vine was amazingly successful.

Brothers Logan and Jake Paul, two of the highest-earning Youtubers, started on Vine while they were still in high school.

Singer Shawn Mendes was also discovered on the app aged 15 after his Vine of Justin Bieber’s song As Long As You Love Me went viral.

It was also popular for pranksters – including Frenchman Jerome Jarre, who has since helped raise more than $2m for the Rohingya refugees in Myanmar.

Byte creator Dom Hofmann has spoken about creating a follow-up to Vine – nicknamed v2 – since 2017.

Dom Hofmann’s Vine co-founders Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll have had success with another app since Vine – quiz app HQ Trivia, which launched last year.

At its height, Vine was said to have 200 million users.

Twitter reportedly bought it for $30m (£23m) in 2012, before it had even officially launched, but it struggled to make money and keep up with its competitors.

Although Vines were ended in 2016, the archive is still available online.

The most-looped video is a clip from the match between France and Germany in 2015 when an explosion was heard during the Paris attacks.

It has over 750m loops.

But the content of most Vines weren’t so serious.

Other popular ones include a boy’s emotional state rapidly changing and an Australian news reporter getting “attacked” by a rooster.

Animals always did well.

So did optical illusions and pranks.

And judging by the reaction to Byte’s first tweet, there’s definitely appetite out there for more videos like these.

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