A year ago, GoAnimate became Vyond. (Wow, has it really been a year already?)
We rebranded because we believe the product we’ve spent over a decade perfecting and our vision for the future go beyond animation into truly moving media. Organizations need to make media that moves others to action. They need to go beyond static content, beyond poor engagement, and someday, maybe even beyond video. That’s why we became Vyond.
Our team is proud of what we have accomplished over the past year. To celebrate with our community, here’s a recap of why we rebranded and what changes we made to put the power of video in the hands of everyone.
Why we rebranded to Vyond
In the days of GoAnimate, our company’s sole focus was, well, animation. We wanted to provide a platform that allowed our customers to make videos quickly and easily.
Today, we’re still in the business of making video creation as simple as possible—but we’ve broadened our focus. Vyond is a place to create all types of moving media—compelling data visualizations, custom characters, enhanced live-action—for any situation. And we have more planned for the future.
Here are a few ways we expanded our product focus to being a driver of communication rather than just animation.
- Changing our name: “Vyond” represents our commitment to media that moves others to action and someday, that may even mean going “beyond video.”
- Improving our product’s performance: We added enterprise-specific tools, improved workflows, and rebuilt our platform on HTML-5 technology. These changes made our product faster, more secure, and easier to use across teams.
- Enhancing our security: To become an even safer communication tool, we fully committed ourselves to the highest security standards and data-privacy protection for our subscribers worldwide.
- Best-in-class support: In our commitment to providing exceptional service, we created the Vyond Accel program to provide greater support to enterprise organizations. We also focused on expanding our customer support, growing our community and adding to our library of resources to help all customers improve their video-creation skills with Vyond.
What we accomplished in our first year
It’s hard to believe that it’s been only a year since we became Vyond—a lot happened! Here is a recap of our first year as Vyond.
Product updates
Over the past year, we created and updated several product features to make our tool faster and more secure for businesses:
- Switched from Flash to HTML5-based software, which is supported by more browsers and is more secure than Flash.
- Thousands of new assets, including tons of characters, actions, props, animals, backgrounds, and character components. Not to mention, our Whiteboard Animation style now includes color-customizable props that can be easily branded.
- Better import and export options. Customers can now import MP4 files into the Vyond Studio with improved video file support. You can also now download your video from within Vyond Studio.
- We’ve added color changeable props and backgrounds to the Contemporary and Whiteboard styles, making it easy to match videos to your brand.
- New keyboard shortcuts to make video editing faster and easier.
- We now offer global editing, a new feature that enhances productivity by making it possible to swap the same element in multiple scenes.
Video creation resources
Along with new features, we’ve released blog posts, webinars, templates, and other resources to educate our community and help them create dynamic, engaging content:
- Templates: As part of our 12 Days of Video holiday campaign, we released 13 free video templates for Vyond customers last December. These templates are designed for a wide variety of use cases—marketing, HR, infographics, and product explainers.
Conferences and events
Over the past year, meeting Vyond users in person was one of the most valuable experiences for our team.
By talking with customers at conferences and Vyond meet-ups around the world, our team was able to learn more about what customers love about our product and how it can be improved. Reflecting on the past year, our team is happy to see how our product updates, resources, and events helped Vyond customers create high-quality videos over the past year.
Looking to the future of Vyond
After a successful first year, our team is feeling excited about the future of Vyond and what that means for our customers. Here is a bit of news about what you can look forward to in Vyond over the next year:
New product features
- Rich-text editing
- Text support for right-to-left languages (including Arabic, Hebrew, and Farsi)
- New storyboarding capabilities
- A text export feature to assist with video translations
Phasing out the legacy platform
After several years of development, listening to users’ feedback, and making adjustments to our product in public beta, we are confident in the stability and feature set of Vyond Studio. Our current product is equipped with robust features that make it faster and easier to use than our original GoAnimate legacy video maker.
We encourage users who haven’t already switched from the legacy version to Vyond Studio to do so soon. You don’t need to worry about losing your old videos by making the switch—you can migrate them.
We plan to fully retire the Legacy video maker in the near future before Flash retires. We’ll share more details in the upcoming months to keep you posted.
Events
The year ahead is full of meetups, conferences, and webinar events for us. We’re excited to meet more of our customers and gain more industry knowledge year-after-year.
Stay up to date on where you can connect with Vyond by checking our full events calendar here.
We’re here for our customers
Our first year as Vyond was a success, thanks to our supportive customers. We know that it can be tricky to navigate major product changes during a rebrand, so we appreciate your sticking with Vyond throughout the past year and everything you’ve done to help us improve.
Looking ahead, our mission remains the same: putting video in the hands of everyone. Any changes we make in our product will always be for the sake of enabling our customers to create high-quality media that moves.
