Tech

APP OF THE MONTH: JamCam allows you to soundtrack your own videos

by Knar Bedian

JamCam’s main concept is so basic, it’s a surprise no one jumped on it earlier. Founder Matt Loszak couldn’t have been the only one of us frustrated with the inability to keep the music playing during iPhone video recordings, but he was the first to try to remedy the problem. Enter JamCam, a recording app and platform for sharing videos set to the soundtrack of your choice. It could mean swapping out an underwhelmingly mediocre recording of a live concert with a higher quality track version, pairing beautiful scenery with the song of your choice, or lip-syncing to your favorite tune—it’s up to you.

AUX: Could you tell me a little about the story behind the origin of JamCam?

Matt Loszak: JamCam was born out of a frustration with other video recording apps on the App Store—namely, that they would all stop my iPhone’s music during video recording. I wanted to be able to spontaneously capture those moments in which the music and surroundings just seem to match perfectly.

Was the team behind JamCam involved in the music or video world prior to JamCam?

Music has been a huge part of the lives of both members of the JamCam team.

I (Matt Loszak) worked at a small acoustical engineering firm in Toronto where I stayed for one year. During that time I became obsessed with programming and design, and taught myself enough of the web and iOS based programming languages to build whatever I had in my head. One month after quitting my day job, I started to build JamCam. My newly appointed co-founder (Sam Scofy) dropped out of college so he could dive right into the world of business. He quickly found himself drawn to the music industry, and got involved with a new company based out of San Francisco called EVNTLIVE, which was later acquired by Yahoo. Determined to take everything he’d learned at EVNTLIVE and apply it to an early stage startup, Sam contacted me and we almost instantly began working together on the future of JamCam.

It seems like there is currently no way to filter the videos by music or artist. Do you plan on adding a search button or filter capacities?

We definitely plan on adding search capabilities in the next update. It’s been something that we’ve really been looking forward to adding, but since the community is still so young, we’ve been giving it time to grow.

At the moment, the user engagement seems limited. What did you envision the JamCam community to be, or how do you hope to encourage community life on JamCam?

Coming from an engineering background, I’m all about analyzing the JamCam data. One of the things that I love to see is that 90% of our active users have shot at least one video, leaving only 10% as purely content consumers. Traditionally, content creation is the problem, but on JamCam almost everyone is a content producer. I think this is a result of the way JamCam was designed. On Vine, when you open the app you are presented with a list of videos. On JamCam, opening the app takes you right to the record screen, as the app was designed from the beginning to make capturing those spontaneous musical moments as easy as possible. We definitely want to drive up engagement with user profiles and followings. People are gradually discovering other users’ great videos, and lots of viewing and voting is going on. The challenge we have in front of us is to keep content creation high, while continuing to improve the stickiness and addictiveness of the JamCam community.

Any future plans for JamCam?

Despite JamCam’s modest beginnings, we’re getting increasingly excited about the vertical we’re in and the direction we’re heading. A new form of marketing has been evolving in the age of the social network, in which brands are paying creative people to make engaging and organic ads that sit beside the rest of your friends’ posts. We see this as an amazing opportunity for an early stage video sharing startup like ourselves—you’ll just have to wait and see what we do with it.