FlipLive Dead As Cisco Pulls Plug On Flip Line

This week Cisco announced that it was killing off the Flip line of camcorders. You might recall that last July we first caught wind of a very cool sounding new Flip camcorder that was being developed that packed in WiFi to allow the camera to stream your video live. Sadly, the death of the Flip brand means that camera – the FlipLive – will never come to be.

The New York Times' David Pogue is talking a bit about the decision of Cisco to kill the brand. As he points out, it has only been two years since Cisco bought the brand. The purchase cost Cisco $590 million. Many people thought the smartphones we all carry around that can record HD video was the cause. Pogue reckons there is more to it that that with the relatively small portion of the country that actually uses a smartphone that can record video.

Another strange fact about the death of the Flip brand is that Pogue says that only a month ago he was briefed on the next production in the line, which was set to land yesterday. So as of a month ago Cisco was still full steam ahead on the Flip brand. What could change so much in 30 days? It comes down to this for David Pogue; Cisco wanted the Flip tech more than it wanted the Flip brand. That really makes sense considering that Cisco has all sorts of video conferencing tech in its core networking business. That would explain in a very tidy package why Cisco killed the brand rather than selling it off. The tech was worth the $590 million they paid.

[via NYT]