Online Video Sharing

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.

The ($4.2M) financing will be used to continue to build out Motionbox’s technology and to market the company. Motionbox enables consumers to quickly and easily sift through video to find and share the moments that make personal video worth shooting, watching and sharing. Motionbox’s goal is to offer the simplest and quickest way to share online video.

"For 99% of people, online video is about sharing the moments, not creating professional video presentations," said Chris O’Brien, Motionbox’s co-founder and CEO. "You shouldn’t have to be a pro, or learn complicated editing software to make and share compelling online personal video. Time is precious, so Motionbox makes it easy to get to the good stuff — and share it — fast. We think it’s a game-changer."

"Motionbox’s technology solves a major problem — how to make personal video more user-friendly and easier to share, particularly for the ‘rest of us’ folks who aren’t very tech savvy," said SAS Investors’ Josh Grotstein. "They are also uniquely positioned to work with partners across all media."

Personally, I tend to lump Jumpcut, EyeSpot and Motionbox all together, in that their technology depends on you already having existing digital files that you’ve managed to digitize on your own. With an upload limit of 50-100MB, there is also a requirement to pre-cut your video prior to uploading it should it not fit within this size limit. The result is a group of services focused of managing and mashing already-small bits of video. If you have a long video (think about your latest videotape you’ve recorded), you need another editing application to capture and cut your video before using one of these companies.

And this all boils down to the major problem facing these companies — The vast majority of high-quality (and personally important) video is still being recorded onto videotape. Consumers wanting to preserve and share high-quality personal video will gravitate towards services that offer an all-in-one web-based service — capture, editing, uploading, archiving and sharing.  Getting your videotape digitized and ingested into online accounts will be the major hurdle to get widespread adoption and full utilization. 

Making this happen requires offering two approaches — a do-it-yourself solution and an outsourced solution that will digitize your old or new videotapes and maintain high-quality versions for tomorrow.  So far, only StashSpace and VideoEgg allow you to capture video directly from a digital videocamera (although it should be stated that although VideoEgg has a great video capture mechanism, their editing features are extremely limited compared to the rest of this online editing cast).  StashSpace and OneTrueMedia also allow you to take advantage of mail-order processing of your videotapes to be uploaded directly to your account for the hashing and mashing of clips.

Amazingly enough, there was not a video sharing entry already posted in Wikipedia.  So we created one.  Hopefully this will allow for the start of a discourse to define just what is "Video Sharing" in today’s web?

Video sharing has not become the video equivalent of today’s typical photo-sharing company.  Instead the big fish in the video sharing pond is more broadcast company, giving power to the individual to broadcast to the masses — something the big three in Photo-Sharing (oFoto, Shutterfly, Snapfish) would shudder at.

And the video sharing industry has already started to segment itself based on feature sets and capabilities.  While the now-traditional Video Sharing companies specialize in broadcasting user-generated content, we now also have companies providing white-label technology to other social sites (such as Video Egg, Reality Digital, VidaVee and HomeMovie.Com), companies developing web-based video-editing capabilities (StashSpace, EyeSpot, JumpCut, MotionBox), as well as two companies (StashSpace and VideoEgg) deploying web-based video-capture tools to ease the importation of videotaped content into online accounts.

Please have at it, add your company to the list and help us all define the new world of Video Sharing at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_sharing.

Lugnut, founded in June, 2006, is a blog that focuses on reviewing new web 2.0 video products and companies.  At a time when this space is getting overcrowded and oversold (some estimations now of 100+ video sharing companies, with 20+ being funded!), the video-sharing industry needs to have a dedicated space for review, trading ideas and keeping up on the latest offerings, as well as understanding how the space is starting to segment.  Lugnut is edited by Lars Krumme, a serial streaming entrepreneur who first started streaming NPR Broadcasts for the Ford Foundation in 1995, founded Online Video Service (a Public Affiars Webcasting Company) in 1999, co-founded HomeMovie.Com in 2000, and is currently EVP Sales & Marketing for HomeMovie.Com. Other authors will be joining Lugnut in September.

What is "Video Sharing?"
The Video Sharing space is becoming crowded and already starting to see segmentation - Community Viral Sharing Sites (YouTube, Grouper, Google Video, etc.), Video Sharing Enablers (Video Egg), and Web-based Video-Editing & Private Sharing Companies (HomeMovie.Com, OneTrueMedia, JumpCut, etc.)

Like all good blogs, I will endeavor to be as objective as possible in my current my position and encourage a vibrant two-way communication platform.  Comments, trackbacks and other feedback will always be welcome.

If you would like to contact Lugnut with suggestions, comments, opinions or new company announcements, please feel free to contact me at larsk@homemovie.com.