Microsoft announced that it will acquire Clipchamp, a web-based video editor. But it’s unclear how the tool will be integrated into existing offerings.

“Clipchamp is an in-browser video creation and editing experience founded in 2013 with a mission to empower anyone to tell stories worth sharing,” Microsoft corporate vice president Chris Pratley explains of the acquisition. “The Clipchamp team is dedicated to making a video app they would personally love and are proud to have the world use as well. Clipchamp’s technical approach is to combine the simplicity of a web app with the ability to process video using the full computing power of a PC with graphics processing unit (GPU) acceleration, something that was formerly limited to traditional video applications.”

Clipchamp is also uniquely aligned with Microsoft’s cloud-based subscription focus: Though the company offers a free tier, it’s free in name only and is borderline useless because of its low-quality output. Instead, customers need to subscribe to expensive paid tiers—at $9 to $39 per user per month—to access truly useful features like HD output, cloud media backup, stock audio access, and, in the more expensive tiers, custom branding.

Microsoft says that Clipchamp will “extend the cloud-powered productivity experiences in Microsoft 365 for individuals, families, schools, and businesses,” which suggests that these paid tiers will be offered to its own customers as part of their existing subscriptions and/or as extra-cost add-ons. Somehow, this web app is also “a great fit for Windows,” probably because it lacks a native video editor now beyond the basic tools hidden in the Photos app.

But there is little in the way of specifics. “More on that later,” Mr. Pratley teases.

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