Yahoo! Acquires Web Video-editing Company

Internet media giant Yahoo! has acquired Jumpcut, a site that provides simple-to-use online video-editing tools, in its latest bid to enhance its Web video services offerings.

Six-month-old Jumpcut of San Francisco provides Web users a free set of online video editing tools that give people the ability to manipulate moving video images without the need to own or install software on their own computers. While the popularity of online video watching has surged, the numbers of people actually creating video programming remains a tiny fraction of the audience of passive viewers. In a statement, Yahoo! said Jumpcut gives users a convenient way to create multimedia mashups of different types of video and other media. "As part of Yahoo! we'll be working on bringing video editing and remixing to everyone with an Internet connection," Jumpcut said in a statement on its own Web site.

Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo! is looking to recapture momentum among online video viewers following the success this year among U.S. Web users of YouTube, the top provider of user-generated videos. While statisticians paint conflicting views of the competitive landscape within the online video sharing market, YouTube attracted twice the number of visitors of No. 2 placed MySpace, which has twice the visits of Google Inc., according to U.S. market data from Internet measurement firm Hitwise Inc. MySpace is a unit of News Corp.Jumpcut will join other recent acquisitions by Yahoo! including photo sharing site Flickr and Del.icio.us, a site that encourages users to share popular bookmark links to Web sites.

Among other goals of the deal, Jumpcut said it will be working with Yahoo!'s media and advertising partners to help them create high-quality content for remixing into movies.It also will expand the ability for Web users to use Jumpcut tools to post on independent Web sites. A video about Jumpcut's plan to merge with Yahoo! can be seen here.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.