Vine owner Twitter announced plans to shut the service down back in October. After struggling to grow beyond its core premise of six-second looping videos, Vine has been driven out of the market by newer rivals like Snapchat and the dominance of larger companies such as Facebook.
Vine will finally shut down later today when its app will become unavailable in app stores. The Vine servers will move into a limited state, refusing to accept new uploads but still hosting the main Vine website.
You can download your existing Vine content by heading to your profile page online or within any of the company’s mobile apps. You’ll see a “Save Videos” button displayed prominently beneath your profile image. Tapping the button will allow you to back up videos directly to your phone or get a download link that you can use in a browser. The link also includes a list of the likes and re-vines made on each clip you shared.
Vine as we know it will cease to exist after today. However, the app’s basic concept will live on in the form of Vine Camera. When Vine is removed from app stores, it will be replaced by a new product that lets you shoot six-second looping videos on your phone. The clips can be saved locally or uploaded directly to Twitter.
Twitter previously thanked Vine users for their commitment to the app. It launched in 2013 having already been purchased by Twitter in a deal worth $30 million. It looked like a potentially disruptive app with the potential to be popular with young, fun-loving audiences. A lack of new features and wider growth issues at Twitter led to it slowly being forgotten though. Former fans switched to services such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat which have combined Vine’s looping videos with more capabilities, including overlays and masks.
“Thank you for the culture that you have helped shape, and for the content you’ll continue to make everywhere,” said Twitter. “You make the world a funnier, weirder, richer, more beautiful place.”
Vine users have expressed a mixture of sadness and acceptance at the service’s shutdown. Its biggest stars have explained how the service began to lose its way after launch, leading to uncertainty in the community. Daz Black, the most followed British Viner, told the BBC he started using other services alongside Vine after hitting one million followers, saying he “didn’t want to put all my eggs in one basket, and I’m really glad that I didn’t.”
A similar sentiment has been expressed by other prominent users. “Vine just didn’t keep with the creator and the influencer,” Viner Ben Phillips said to the BBC. “They lost sight of what Vine actually was. YouTube and Facebook have so much more to offer the creator now.”
Twitter will keep the Vine website online indefinitely, allowing you to continue viewing Vines that have already been created. The company has pledged to notify creators before making any further changes, saying it wants to manage the shutdown “the right way.” For most people, Vine’s death is today though, the date when it’s no longer possible to receive likes on new videos.
