Dive Brief:

• The standalone Vine app officially shuttered Tuesday, a move that was expected, and was replaced with Vine Camera. The new tool allows Twitter users to create videos up to 6.5 seconds in length and post them to Twitter, where the clips will automatically loop, as announced in a Vine tweet. The looping feature won’t be limited to Vine Camera video shorts, however, as Twitter will also begin looping any video of that length.
• After first announcing the end of Vine in October, parent company Twitter reportedly considered selling the app but determined the risks outweighed the benefits of losing control of the brand, according to TechCrunch. 
• The company announced the shift to Vine Camera in December, giving users some time to download their old clips before the standalone app was killed off. 

Dive Insight:

Marketers who have struggled to think of a use for Twitter beyond basic customer service might now be interested in toying with Vine Camera, as short-form video content has proven to be popular with both brands and consumers.

Procter & Gamble, one of the largest advertising spenders, has embraced video ads that are shorter than the usual 30- or 60-second spots. In November, P&G's Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard suggested his company is "increasingly using five-second to six-second formats that quickly convey the brand and the benefit, given the ad-skipping behavior that we know happens quite frequently." 

Vine Camera, with its hard 6.5-second cap, might be perfect for this type of short-form video marketing. 

Vine as a standalone app had always been an interesting, if a bit odd, video experiment given its limited functionality — super short clips that automatically loop. And in a way that limited functionality was what made the app most attractive for both users and marketers at launch, with limited screen time forcing some sort of creative approach to capture attentions.

However, in a world where Snapchat dominates the social marketing conversation with its own short, ephemeral videos, Vine's limited use cases began to look more like a weakness, and many of the creators who helped make the platform migrated elsewhere.

Twitter, for its part, has been struggling on the whole, and the initial announcement of Vine's shuttering was paired with a round of layoffs at the company. However, the micro-blogging site has been making a more concentrated push into being a video platform over the past 12 months, with a variety of live streaming options and now with Vine Camera.