• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 14, 2011

A Clio-winning creative director, Emmy winner and engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will launch a series of online video creation tools that allow companies to create ads for pennies on the dollar. The company, dubbed Tubifi, provides a platform allowing brands to download clips from content providers, collaborate in the production process, and edit and publish clips to Facebook, YouTube or other platforms.

A library of professional video clips, music and messages support Tubifi through license agreements and partnerships on computers and mobile devices. Tubifi will work with Thought Equity Motion's application programming interface to access millions of hours of video in their online library.

Brands looking to create the videos can view the clips and listen to the music before they purchase the content, according to Ian Brower, Tubifi chief creative officer and co-founder. "The way people consume content on mobile devices these days is much more personal," he said. "The need to personalize content becomes more critical. Mass market isn't dead, but changing dramatically."

Travel brands, for example, will have an option of going to Tubifi, searching and choosing videos on a specific topic, selecting the music and voiceover. The site will offer typography and editing tools. Another option is to have Tubifi create the video ad. The price to create the videos will depend on the number of clips and content. A handful of companies, seven to 10, have begun to test the technology, but the platform will not become available until early next year. By that time, Tubifi could integrate natural language processing coming out of MIT into the platform to build out reporting capabilities that provide the ability to analyze what people say in Twitter feeds and Facebook. It will help brands understand the data.

A dashboard will provide reporting on how videos perform, such as 10% of people closed the video at the 27-second mark, or shared the video with 20 friends, or post the clip to YouTube or Vimeo, or link to it through a Twitter Tweet. The offering focuses on supporting small and-medium-sized businesses, but it isn't the only one to recently launch.

Tubifi is not the only company to launch a video platform for small and medium-sized businesses. Last week, Near Networks, a Hollywood production studio, launched a service to create videos for SMBs.

Tubifi was founded by software, video and advertising executives including John Belchers, CEO; Brower, a Clio-winning creative director; Harbaldeep Singh, chief product officer and an Emmy- winning video software engineer; and Micha Barnum, a former MIT graduate.