The co-founder of now defunct video app Vine, Don Hoffman, said plans to launch an unofficial successor later this year have been put on hold indefinitely due to financial and legal reasons.
Vine was a popular service used to make six-second videos and was owned by Twitter, which pretty much shut it down in 2016.
Hofmann said in January this year he was helming a project called v2 which would “be very familiar to people who have used Vine”. Twitter was not associated with v2, although the logo of the app is quite similar to the original.
However, in a recent blog post he explained: “When I announced that I was working on a follow-up to Vine, I also (perhaps foolishly) announced that it would be a personal project and personally funded. Taking into account a larger-than-expected audience, we now know that the estimated costs for the first few months alone would be very high, way beyond what can be personally funded.”
He said that legal fees have been “overwhelming” and the project will need to operate as a company with sizable external funding from investors.
Hofmann said backers of an early-stage company he already runs would not be happy “with the split attention, and I wouldn’t be either. This is potentially solvable, but it’s going to take time for the space and resources to become available.”
The company he is referring to is Innerspace VR, a creative immersive entertainment studio he founded after selling Vine to Twitter in 2012 for around $30 million.
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