Online Video Sharing

A few weeks ago, I ran a quick informational post about the Pure Digital FlipVideo Camera over at DVGadgets. I was so taken by the potential of the camera, that I purchased the 30 minute version the very next week.

And Jean and I haven’t had this much fun with a video camera. Ever.

We are acknowledged video freaks. We bought the Canon GL-1 when it launched years ago, and have a variety of Sony and Panasonic MiniDV (standard and Widescreen) camcorders to go along with our digital cameras as well.

But here’s the rub. When we’re heading out and know we want to take video, we’ll grab one of our camcorders, as well as one of our tripods if the occasion warrants. When you want high-quality video, nothing beats videotape. We very rarely just want pictures, but on occasion will also have our digital camera packed away somewhere in our car - “Just in Case”.

The problem comes when we’re just out and about on a casual trip and didn’t plan on taking any video. And that’s where the FlipVideo comes to the rescue.

Small and very light, Jean has taken to bringing the FlipVideo everywhere in her purse. After 10 days of using it, she has claimed it as her own. The casual, candid, everyday family moments that were usually a story to tell to my parents over the phone are now being preserved and shared in video form with my family over the web. Extremely easily.

Although the FlipVideo comes with easy-to-use software to upload your videos to Grouper or YouTube, I choose to upload all our video to stashSpace. Yes, I am a co-founder of the company [disclosure], but my free account at stashSpace lets me trim the starts & ends off of the individual clips, and arrange them in a movie sequence. This way, I can share one movie (made up of a number of clips) with my family, instead of having to share a whole range of individual clips. The video management features (movies, collections, tagging, search, etc.) make it very easy to customize movies for different family members, as well as just keep track of all the video that you take.

I was hoping the FlipVideo would be a convenient would be an easy-to-use way for Jean to take video and post it online for our families without having to get me involved. I am glad these hopes were not in vain.

What else can I say except if you are currently using a photo sharing or video sharing service, buy a FlipVideo now! I very rarely feel this strong about product recommendations, but this is a video device that makes video accessible across all generations.

Even if you own a digital camcorder or camera that can take video, you still need to go out and buy a FlipVideo now! It is not a replacement for your current camera or camcorder - but it will allow you to preserve so many more of your precious moments on video for the future.

Apple announced today that videos from video sharing powerhouse YouTube will soon be available to watch in your living room through your AppleTV. Starting in mid-June, thousands of current YouTube videos will be made available for live streaming to your Television, with thousands more being added every week until the entire YouTube collection is available sometime this fall. Instead of using your mouse, you will be able to use the Apple Remote to browse, find and watch YouTube videos through the AppleTV.

The YouTube feature for Apple TV will be available as a free software update in mid-June. Given the issues that I have with my current PC to TV video setup, for watching our online home movies and YouTube videos, I may have to finally break down and buy one of these!

>> Read more in the official Press Release

MySpace unceremoniously dumped PhotoBucket late Tuesday night, adding the popular photo and video-sharing site to a list of companies that MySpace has restricted access to.  MySpace claims that PhotoBucket was violating their TOS by generating add revenue from Videos posted to MySpace, but PhotoBucket CEO Alex Welch denies that videos contained advertising.

It appears that this dispute arose over numerous posting of a Sony-sponsored slideshow featuring images from Spiderman 3.  Although the slideshow itself was not generating money on a PPC or CPM basis, my impression is that Sony sponsored the ad with the understanding that PhotoBucket could drive a substantial number of impressions, with the largest source of these presumably coming from MySpace.

So the question here is whether this action was a direct violation of the MySpace TOS.  Fox Interactive Media certainly thinks so, stating that,  "Photobucket recently began running an ad-sponsored slideshow,” and encouraged users to post these slide shows on MySpace. “We spoke to the company about their actions, but they refused to respect our community’s terms and we had no choice but to disable their service.”

In a written statement in response to MySpace, Welch states that “Photobucket was not contacted by MySpace about this issue… Some of our users choose to share their slideshows with friends on blogs and social networks, of which MySpace is obviously one. This content is not clickable and does not generate revenue for Photobucket – only the branded content and environments on Photobucket do that. In addition, MySpace is claiming that some of these slideshows contravene its terms of service. However, it has decided to block the posting of user-generated videos from Photobucket, not slideshows.”

The TOS point in question is Item 8-13 which states that "Prohibited Content includes, but is not limited to Content that, in the sole discretion of MySpace.com: ……. Involves commercial activities and/or sales without our prior written consent such as contests, sweepstakes, barter, advertising, or pyramid schemes;"  The TOS then further states that, "advertising to, or solicitation of, any Member to buy or sell any products or services through the MySpace Services," is prohibited.  So it certainly seems that MySpace is within their rights to include or exclude whoever they want from their playground in this instance.

It is hard to argue, however, that the relationships between 3rd party widget providers and MySpace has been all but one-sided.  MySpace and the large landscape of widget companies have all benefitted together.  Overall, the MySpace layout controls and functionality  leave a lot to be desired, and many community members have probably only stuck around (and invited their friends) because of the freedom that they have historically had over adding 3-rd party features & designs to their profile.  Widget companies have provided a benefit to MySpace by adding this advanced functionality and keeping development and associated hosting costs off their balance sheet.

Certainly as free services continue to try and find ways to monetize the eyeballs they’ve collected, disputes will arise.  I can’t imagine that PhotoBucket and MySpace are not able to get back to the table and find a possible financial solution for this mess.  But maybe that’s just part of the reasoning behind this move.

Technology and Web 2.0 pundits have been weighing in on the future plight of PhotoBucket and the frailty of building your business depending on the traffic of others. You can read more on TechCrunch, GigaOm and Scobleizer.

As mentioned in an earlier post, Pizza and a Video Sharing Site, I recently purchased a system to begin watching video sharing sites on my TV.  It just got to be too much to have my family huddled around my computer to watch our home videos online or latest funny videos from YouTube.

After two days of dealing with the S-Video & Audio cable setup & swapping, I realized that a hard-wired solution was just not for me — too much work and too much of a mess.  After some (quick) research online, I ordered the GrandTec Ultimate Wireless PC to TV setup, primarily because it was the only one that had an S-Video input.

The setup was easy.  You have two key pieces for the wireless video & audio - a transmitter that you hook up to your computer, and a receiver that you hook up to your television. 

The transmitter can either hook up to your SVGA (monitor) port or your S-Video port, and has all the audio cables required to hook into the audio output of your sound card.

Unfortunately, the receiver is only able to hook-up to your TV via standard composite video cable, even though the packaging advertises "Composite, S-Video and RGB Video output via traditional cables."  This is a big negative in the long-run, as downloaded movies that you might want to watch will suffer in quality not being in at least S-Video resolution.

All-in-all, the GrandTec Ultimate Wireless PC to TV System is average — I would hesitate to wholly endorse it’s "Ultimate" designation.  The video quality leaves a little bit to be desired, and the audio tends to get static whenever my Gas FirePlace fan turns on (go figure).  But it sure makes watching video from online video sharing sites a lot more enjoyable for a group of people.

Whatever happened to pizza and a movie?  More and more, I find myself and my family watching more and more online video.  Our typical Friday night pizza and a movie has now been replaced by pizza and a number of video sharing sites.

I have three kids (9, 8 and 1), so the first stop is usually 30 minutes of checking out video sharing site YouTube for the latest crazy dog or cat stunts from Americas Funniest Home Videos.  Even though my daughter has probably seen many of the same sequences 10 times or more, she still busts out laughing every time.  Why YouTube instead of Revver, MetaCafe, etc?  Two main reasons come to mind - breadth of selection and a fair chance that most of the content will be appropriate for my kids (MetaCafe still allows adult content).

After the laughs come the memories.  I have used home video sharing site StashSpace to record, tag and organize over 50 hours of my digital home videos on my laptop, and have another 50 or so hours of analog video stored on their remote servers (Disclosure, I am a co-founder of parent company HomeMovie.Com). 

My son & daughter love looking back at individual video clips of when they were babies, and marvel at how much they both looked like my youngest son as a baby.  They also get a kick out of watching mom & dad from earlier times as kids ourselves (from old film we had transferred) or seeing our life without the kids.   

And although I have DVD copies of all my edited home-video movies, we find it much easier to search for individual clips (we’ve tagged most of them) and watch on my laptop instead of swapping out DVDs. We also recently bought a wireless PC to TV system (from GrandTec) so that we can watch the videos on TV instead of the laptop.

I don’t see this trend slowing down any time soon — we’ll continue to watch more and more online video.  We’ve already started testing out the movie download sites (personally enjoy Amazon Unbox the best), and usually download & watch one movie a week.  Now I just need to figure out how to get some more local storage for all this video….

With summer quickly becoming a lingering memory, many families are faced with the decision of how to preserve and share the video they collected over their break.  If you are looking for an online service to easily record, edit, preserve and share your videos,  it’s hard to find one that does exactly what you want. For customer Terry Ostrowiak, StashSpace.Com did the trick.

“I didn’t want my family and friends having to wade through 8 hours of video and watch scenes that had no interest to them,” Terry says.  “When I discovered StashSpace.Com I knew immediately I had found the answer. I could quickly take the important clips from any of my videos and watch them individually or put them together into movies I wanted to share and keep safe.”

Competing video sharing sites let you upload short bits of video to share with the world, but typically only allow short, low-quality clips that they require you to digitize through some means of your own.

“The vast majority of personal video is still being recorded with a camcorder, and this means having to find an easy way to get your high quality taped content online where it can be preserved, shared, and easily accessed… what we call ‘Stashing’.” said Lars Krumme, co-founder of StashSpace. “With StashSpace, you build your own digital stash of video memories. You can easily capture all of your home videos directly from your digital camcorder, make movies with just your best stuff and share it with family and friends online, on MySpace, on DVD or on your Video iPod.”

Most importantly, videos in your Stash are also archived in high-quality format for a full year to guard against accidental loss due to house-fires, the inevitable hard-drive failure or other unexpected events.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened recently to Terry.  “I just had a technical problem with my computer and lost a lot of video and pictures,” he says, “but I still had all of my stuff on StashSpace.Com.”

His online Stash enabled Terry to share video with family friends he hadn’t seen in 20 years during a recent trip to Israel. “I showed them edited movies of themselves as children and video of our parents on an overseas trip,” he says. “They just watched in awe.”

You can use StashSpace’s web-based service for free to capture and edit your movies on your own computer.  When you are done creating movies, you load them into your Stash, where they are archived for a full year. You get a free two-hour Stash just for signing up and using StashSpace, and can then buy credits to extend this year or add more video to your Stash.  DVDs of your movies can be ordered for as little as $15.

So what are you waiting for?  Don’t let those tapes become faded and forgotten relics of summers past.  Stash them now with StashSpace.Com.