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Sharing private videos? Give Givit a chance

givit

Get ready for yet another video-sharing app. But this one has a twist: unlike Socialcam or Klip or Vlix, Givit, which is available on the web and now on the iPhone, is designed to limit the number of viewers who can watch the videos you upload.

Givit is a consumer-facing video sharing site from the folks behind white-label video VMIX. The company has already built out all the video infrastructure necessary for managing video distribution online, so now it’s applying that technology to allow consumers to share videos with their friends and family.

Unlike other social video sharing apps, the point of Givit isn’t to distribute videos widely into public social networks like Facebook or Twitter, but to make them viewable only by a small number of users. The typical use case is for families that want to share videos of their children but don’t feel comfortable with those videos being available on the likes of YouTube (s GOOG) or other public-facing video sites.

While providing tools to let users limit access to a close circle, it’s making it ultra-easy for friends to watch those videos, from whatever device they’re on — whether it be their laptop or a mobile web browser. That’s because Givit transcodes videos into multiple formats to support a wide range of browsers and devices.

VMIX historically has been focused on the enterprise, with a video distribution platform used by a wide range of media companies. But lately, it’s been exploring different consumer applications. Recently it created a location-based video-sharing application called Vincinty. While not exactly a success, VMIX CEO Greg Kostello told us that they did learn a lot from the service.

As for Givit — the service is in public beta now, and is free to use, but the company is planning to introduce new services under a freemium model. That could include increasing the number of videos or storage space that users have access to, as well as other additional value-added features. But for now, the company is just trying to get more users and figure out how they’re interacting with the service.

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