CNN to acquire video sharing app maker Beme

Bloomberg

Time Warner’s CNN said that it has agreed to acquire the staff and technology behind social media app Beme, created by YouTube star Casey Neistat and Matt Hackett. Financial terms weren’t disclosed. The company said its 12 employees will join CNN.
Beme was created to offer a social application that allows millennials and others to share short videos without the ability to edit content.
“CNN changed the world at the end of the 20th century, using the then-emerging technologies of cable television and satellite video feeds to add depth, breadth, and speed to our understanding of it,” Hackett, a former Tumblr executive, wrote in a blog post. “In starting Beme, Casey and my goals were just as lofty: to reshape social media into the vehicle for candid, unfiltered perspectives that we always felt it should be. We wanted to create more empathy in the world by making the perspective of each of its inhabitants immediately and compellingly accessible through video.”
He added: “Social media is supposed to connect across geographies and beliefs, to be tool for building a less cruel and more creative world. It is this idealism for what technology can achieve that built Beme. Recent days have made it crushingly obvious that social media we have built so far — at Beme or elsewhere  — has not yet achieved this ideal … Truth matters. Hearing voices and seeing perspectives far from your own matters. These principles, on which Beme was built, will form core of our mission as a part of CNN.”
Hackett wrote that Beme would be shutting down on Jan. 31 to become part of the Time Warner news network powerhouse. “By joining forces with CNN, we’re able to give our mission more than just one, startup-budgeted shot,” he said. “We are going to hunker down and create something new. To do that with the full focus it deserves, we have to say goodbye to Beme.”