• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, August 8, 2016

A new app called Dubdub, available at the iTunes app store, lets users create a 90-second video, with edits and a music bed and other tools that gives it a professional look. The simplicity of it, on one level, would let earnest do-gooders create good looking videos espousing a cause. On the other end--and this is where the money is--it would let influencers create better looking videos, which for them, is a tangible good.

From the time YouTube started, or even before, the visionaries have seen the time that all of us would be uploading our own videos for the world to experience. It hasn’t happened, of course, because creating a watchable video still takes work and skill and usually, some equipment.

Dubdub has the tools on the free app--an Android one is coming soon-- and offers a course for would-be users, so that the distance between professional and rank amateur seem a little less painfully apparent.  The Website explains it all, and man, it looks kind of simple to create a good looking video just using a smartphone. (Here's one I picked off of its Twitter account.)

“We see a small percentage of people doing their own videos. They’re just overwhelmed,” says Zbigniew Barwicz, the CEO of the Toronto-based start-up.  Certainly, the average guy can communicate effectively, when it’s not that difficult. But it get gets harder: ”It’s easy to fake a picture,” Barwicz says. “It’s not easy to fake a video.”

So right now, even on a for-fun basis, users can be intimidated. “A lot of stuff is ending up in content purgatory,” Barwicz says. “People may have great GoPro video. But then they don’t know what to do with it.”

Barwicz is a successful video entrepreneur who, company literature says, led three start-ups to become public companies, He started Dubdub with Frederick Dionne, sensing a convergence of need and possibility. Until recently, smartphone processing speed, camera quality and potential market hadn’t meshed. Now they do.

He says the 90-second limit is deliberate, and salable, for not only is Dubdub a tool to use, it’s also a platform to be seen in its own place,, not unlike Vine or Periscope in their own realm. “We have ways to monetize Dubdub,” he says. “We not concerned about that.”

The Dubdub platform and simple video editing capability that help get their points across should seem appealing to influencers.  (Then again, I’ve been thinking since the interview that part of the appeal of user-generated level video is its raw naivete. Could even a little slick seem too slick?)

Barwicz says, more altruistically, Dubdub can help give a voice (and a video) to the average guy or the cash-strapped NGO that really hasn’t had the wherewithal to create a very moving picture to pitch its causes. “Frankly, there’s not a lot for them,” Barwicz says. Likewise, for journalists, Dubdub tools would seem to make better quality videos; there’s even a rights-free music library, updated quarterly, so users can insert their own musical overlays. It all seems simple enough; maybe it will work.