Facebook Messenger Incorporates Slick Israeli Video App ‘Magisto’

If you’ve ever felt embarrassed to share your funny home videos, now you can let a smartphone app make a professional short film for you, and then instantly share it with your friends and family. Facebook Messenger has just added a slick instant video feature that was developed by Israeli company Magisto. Now, hundreds of millions of people can use Magisto Shot, a mobile application that turns photos and videos from your smartphone into a 7-second animated film you can share with your messenger buddies.

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It looks like Magisto could potentially revolutionize the way we interact with our friends on Facebook Messenger. The Magisto Shot app, available for iOS and Android, is part of Facebook’s newly launched messenger platform, which brings the ability to add more forms of expression and rich media into conversations. Using artificial intelligence technology, Magisto Shot advances messaging by automatically turning a single photo and a text message into an entertaining video story. The app allows users to pick from their own videos and photos, choose a theme (such as “love” or “party”), pick a song to accompany the video – and after a few minutes, the film is complete with colors, music and graphics.

Currently boasting 55 million registered users who generate 14,000 movies every hour, Magisto will now tap into a much larger market, serving 600 million existing Facebook Messenger users, with the potential to reach another 750 million Facebook users who are yet to install Facebook Messenger.

Magisto, which was founded in 2011 by Dr. Oren Boiman and Dr. Alex Rav-Acha, develops cloud-based mobile technology services for creating and sharing personal movies. Its video editor automatically selects the most compelling moments from ordinary videos and photos and, like an expert video editor, weaves them together to convey a story with customized styles and music. Over the past three years, Magisto has raised $23 million from Qualcomm, SanDisk and Lee Ka-Shing, among others.

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“You can truly show how you feel”

CEO Boiman says Magisto Shot is the next step in the evolution of messaging, turning text and photos into expressive micro-movies with music, motion and visual effects. “Messaging has been continually evolving from its plain text beginnings to more expressive forms of communicating using photos and emoticons,” Boiman said in a statement. “However, these enhancements don’t always succeed in conveying the true depth and richness of human emotion.”

In his opinion, “emoticons somewhat improve plain text, but adding a smiley is like a drum roll that tells you to laugh at a joke’s punchline. Magisto Shot makes messaging much more powerful than it is today by using video to make your message genuinely funny, or happy or sad so you can truly show how you feel.”

It’s important to note that Magisto has a standalone app that’s available for everyone to download and use – without having to connect to Facebook; but from now on, the new Magisto Shot app is available on Facebook Messenger, so you can use your Facebook videos and photos to create short films.