Twitter confirms it will kill Vine video app in days

The company is encouraging people to grab their looping videos before the service shuts down on 17 January

Twitter has confirmed that it is about to kill Vine.

The company announced late last year that it was going to end the popular video sharing app, in a controversial move. Now the owner has confirmed that will happen on 17 January.

At that point, Vine will become "Vine Camera", an app meant for taking videos. It will still be possible to record the app's looping videos from that app, but the community and people's accounts will be removed.

Before that happens, Twitter is telling everyone who can to download their Vines so that they can have them stored away.

That's done by heading either to the iOS or Android app or to the Vine website. On there, there's an option to "save videos" – that presents a menu to choose which Vines need to be downloaded, and they'll come through as normal videos on your phone or computer.

It's also possible to download a special file containing all of the captions, comments and numbers of likes and revines. That's only available on the website.

Other services are offering different ways of downloading Vines. Giphy, for instance, has unveiled a special tool for converting Vines into GIFs.

Twitter is thought to have turned Vine into Vine Camera so that it could keep the app on people's phones and still offer some of the same functionality, while not having to do any of the same upkeep that it did with the Vine community.

"The Vine Camera will allow you to make 6.5 second looping videos and post them to Twitter, or save them to your camera roll in a logged out state," Twitter's FAQ reads. "You will not be able to do any of the other things you can currently do with the Vine app. Once the Vine Camera is live, you will no longer be able to download your Vines from the app."