• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, June 19, 2015

There’s been a lot of focus recently on new ways for people to share events in their lives and the world at large: Just this week Twitter unveiled Project Lightning, which curates tweets around ongoing events, while Facebook launched Moments, which allows users to get their friends’ photos of social gatherings and the like. Now a mobile video editing firm, Magisto, is joining the fray with a new app that turns collections of photos and video into sharable mobile video.

According to a Nielsen custom survey commissioned by Magisto, over two thirds of digital photos and videos are actually never shared, with just 31% ever seeing the light of day. Magisto is setting out to change that with its automated photo and video editing service, which uses artificial intelligence to choose the most compelling photos and videos, then assemble them into videos for social sharing. Users can also customize themes and music.

The Magisto-Nielsen survey had some other interesting findings. For example, one reason most photos aren’t shared is that they’re stored in less accessible places, specifically computers rather than the cloud. Overall 45% of photos and 31% of videos are stored on desktops or laptops. Unsurprisingly Millennials are the most prolific takers of digital photos and video, with 84% doing so weekly. However, their parents are close behind, with 72% of those surveyed taking photos or video every week.

Of course online video is big business for social networks: according to Facebook, its 1.3 billion users were viewing over four billion videos per day as of April, up from three billion per day just three months before. YouTube reached that figure back in 2012.