What really killed the Flip video?

By T.S.

IN THIS week's Babbage podcast my colleague and I discuss the demise of the Flip video (along with Facebook's legal woes, and why it matters what judges have for breakfast). The maker of these wonderfully simple devices was acquired by Cisco in 2009 for $590m and ignominiously shut down this week with the loss of 550 jobs. Cisco, which had vastly overdiversified in recent years, says it wants to focus on its core business of fancy network gear, and is scaling back its ambitions in consumer products. My take is that the Flip was doomed once decent video cameras started to appear in smartphones—my family's own Flips have mostly languished unused since we got iPhones and iPod touches capable of recording video. The high-def camera on the latest models, released last year, is amazingly good. Why carry yet another device around?

David Pogue at the New York Timeshas an intriguing alternative theory, however. Smartphones are not widespread enough to have killed off the Flip, he says (though I would note that Flips have been far outsold by iPhones). Sales were strong, so why not sell the Flip division, rather than shutting it down?

The most plausible reason is that Cisco wants the technology in the Flip more than it wants the business. Cisco is, after all, in the videoconferencing business, and the Flip's video quality—for its size and price—was amazing. Maybe, in fact, that was Cisco's plan all along. Buy the beloved Flip for its technology, then shut it down and fire 550 people.

Well, maybe. But if that was the plan all along, then why bother to continue developing new models, such as the one which, Mr Pogue reveals, was about to be unveiled?

It was called FlipLive, and it added one powerful new feature to the standard Flip: live broadcasting to the Internet. That is, when you're in a Wi-Fi hot spot, the entire world can see what you're filming. You can post a link to Twitter or Facebook, or send an e-mail link to friends. Anyone who clicks the link can see what you're seeing, in real time—thousands of people at once.

Who knows. I'm sticking to my theory that it was the iPhone 4 that did for the Flip. Still, at least we can all agree that the iPad is killing netbooks. Can't we?

Update April 16th: The plot thickens, and readers offer a couple more theories. CallMeBC suggests that the Flip was being outgunned by rival products that offered true HD, rather than by smartphones; and muscatel proposes that this is part of a mysterious scheme by Cisco to placate Apple. Meanwhile, Susan Orlean at the New Yorker, another former Flip user, says it was made redundant by her iPhone 4.