Animoto, the award-winning video creation platform, launches out of beta to celebrate its first anniversary, marking a year of significant business growth and technological innovation.

Since launching in August 2007, more than 250,000 users in more than 200 countries have registered with Animoto.com, and the site has been used to create more than four million videos, viewed over 50 million times on Animoto.com, blogs, social network sites, video sharing sites and web sites around the world.

Animoto lets people quickly and easily create professional-quality videos from their own pictures and music. In the past year, the company has introduced several features to enhance the product and the user experience:

• Facebook application grew to over two million users and became July’s most popular application by percentage of active users
• Music Submission program introduced a powerful new way for bands and artists to promote their music
• Integration with YouTube allows users to export Animoto videos directly to the video sharing site with a click of a button
• Animoto for Business gives businesses large and small the ability to create high-impact videos for any commercial purpose
• Animoto for Education gives teachers, grades K-12, unlimited access to the full range of Animoto’s services for free.

The team behind Animoto set out to put an end to boring slideshows that took the life out of photos. The team of entertainment industry vets created Animoto with Cinematic AI technology that thinks like an actual director and editor, allowing users to create compelling, entertaining music videos with the same sophisticated post-production skills and techniques used in TV and film. Users simply upload images, pick a song, and Animoto takes care of the rest, returning a unique video orchestration with the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer.

“We launched Animoto a year ago with the simple goal of allowing anyone to create professional-looking video content with a click of a button,” said Brad Jefferson, CEO & Co-founder of Animoto.

Animoto Productions, founded in August 2006, is based in New York City with an office in San Francisco.