Snapfish, the photo sharing and printing site from Hewlett Packard, announced today that they’ve acquired the Motionbox video platform, allowing Snapfish to expand its video offering. Current Motionbox users will have their content migrated to their new Snapfish account, and the current Motionbox site will remain online until August. In related news, Posterous is wooing Flickr users as the latest salvo in their Switch To Posterous campaign. → Read More
YouTube alternative and video sharing site Motionbox has acquired competitor and fellow video site Viddyou for an undisclosed amount. Motionbox, which raised $6 million in funding earlier this year, is similar to YouTube in that it allows users to upload and share their videos on the web, but it includes a more in-depth suite of privacy settings that make it better suited for sharing clips with a select group of friends rather than the whole world.
Motionbox also got a boost from AOL, which recommended Motionbox to as an replacement for its Video Uploads service, which was shut down last November. Viddyou has a similar model to Motionbox by featuring extensive privacy controls. The site also focused more on quality of video over quantity by adding support for high definition video. → Read More
Video sharing site Motionbox has just closed a $6 million Series C funding round led by Constellation Ventures, with Canaan Partners and SAS Investors also participating. Alongside the funding, Motionbox is also announcing that its founder and CEO Chris O’Brien will be assuming the role of Chairman of the Board and EVP of Strategy and Corporate Development, with former COO Josh Grotstein taking the reins as CEO.
Motionbox is similar to YouTube in that it allows users to upload and share their videos on the web, but it includes a more robust suite of privacy settings that make it better suited for sharing clips with a select group of friends rather than the whole world. The site offers a free version with standard video sharing options, as well as premium memberships that allow users to upload an unlimited number of videos, with no time limit restrictions. Motionbox’s site also lets users order their videos on DVD and in paper flipbooks, which can recreate brief scenes. → Read More
AOL is on a product-cutting spree. In addition to the shuttering of XDrive, AOL Pictures, MyMobile And Bluestring, the company will also be shutting down the AOL Video Uploads service starting this week.
Users must move their videos prior to December 18, when the service closes for good and the videos will no longer be available. AOL is recommending that users transfer videos to Motionbox, a New York based video sharing and editing startup that we first covered in 2006.
The FAQ that AOL will distribute to users this week is below. This change doesn’t appear to affect AOL Video itself, which focuses on professional content from Hulu, CBS and other sources.
AOL Video Uploads
Q. When will the AOL Video Uploads close?
Effective December 18th, 2008 , AOL Video Uploads (uncutvideo.aol.com ) will be closed and all videos stored will no longer be accessible through AOL Video Uploads. AOL has evaluated several personal video offerings, and believes Motionbox, a leader in online personal video, to be the best suited to handle the needs of AOL Video Upload users. Motionbox is FREE and includes some great features.
We are recommending users go through a simple transfer process to move their videos to Motionbox, and also giving them the option to download or delete videos stored on the site.
Viddyou, a video sharing site that launched almost a year ago as a platform for video bloggers, today rolls out support for high definition video and adds a $35/yr premium membership option for power users. On the surface, Viddyou looks like many of the other video sites out there. But it has so far managed to foster a community that seeks refuge from the masses over at YouTube. Co-founder Aaron Wadler says that Viddyou’s contributers enjoy the site’s extensive privacy controls and lack of both advertisements and trolls. It’s a place where they feel comfortable sharing videos of their children and grandparents, or posting more personal video blogs for and about their friends. Today’s additions are meant to continue that focus on quality over quantity. The high definition video comes in both 720p and 1080p, a first for video sharing sites we’re told (Vimeo provides only 720p). Both look great to the untrained eye, and 1080p might be too processor intensive for most computers anyway. We’ve embedded a 720p video from Viddyou below since 1080p would probably chug and skip for many readers. ViddYou users who want to upload in HD will need to pay for the premium membership, which will also let them download copies of their videos and upload videos of unlimited length (the free version only allows 5 minutes each). Competitors include Motionbox, Vimeo, and Mydeo, three other services that focus on video sharing for friends and family. http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/viddyou_embed.html CrunchBase Information Viddyou Mydeo Motionbox Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Video editing and sharing site Motionbox, which markets primarily to families, has announced the closing of a $7M round of Series B financing led by Constellation Ventures with participation by Canaan Partners and SAS Investors. Motionbox recently released a premium version of its service that allows you to upload files of any size and enjoy unlimited storage for $30 per year. Videos can also now be downloaded for playback on an iPod or similar devices. If you really want to take your videos “offline”, you can order small flipbooks (naturally dubbed “motionbooks”) that will capture 15 seconds of a video on paper. We recently covered Motionbox in our round up of online video sharing services. → Read More
Ever since the social video market boomed through 2006, some video services have sought to differentiate themselves by adding online editors. Jumpcut and Motionbox launched their editors last April and Jumpcut was acquired by Yahoo! 5 months later. Eyespot launched its editor a month before Jumpcut, last March. Last December Gotuit launched their SceneMaker video mashup app. Photobucket recently coming launched its own video/audio/photo editor for premium members (full release next month). Today, Cuts is launching its editor into public beta. If you’re already working with video on the web, an online editor is fast, easy and free. In theory, these services could bring video editing to people who would otherwise never engage in it. People already engaging in video editing can benefit from automatic software updates and the sharing made possible by online communities. Here’s a look at each of the services, followed by a more in depth chart comparing features. Cuts “Simple and easy, when you need edits now” Cuts is the new kid on the block and is all about remixing viral video. They don’t host content, but instead take videos from other sites (YouTube, Google, Myspace). With Cuts you can trim, loop, add preloaded sound effects, and insert captions to enhance the original. Editing is straightforward, consisting of changes to the sound, caption, and navigation levels for the video. Every edit can be re-cut, embedded, and emailed. In the future, Cuts will be expanding into simple editing for digital movies and TV shows. See also our early look at Cuts a few weeks ago. Gotuit “For slicing and dicing scenes” Gotuit Scenemaker is for slicing out scenes from videos on other networks. After importing a video into the program via URL, you can select a start and end for one or more scenes on the video, title, tag, and email the scenes to friends. Unfortunately I couldn’t use it to slice up Gotuit content. Eyespot “Mashups with effects, transitions, and titles” Eyespot is a solid editor that lets you mix together your own Motionbox content or scenes from their promotional media packs. It has a simple drag and drop interface that lets you manage a wide variety of effects and transitions for both the audio and video layers. Eyespot lets you add your own audio and mix in photos as well. While you can’t grab video from other networks, Eyespot’s white label editor is becoming available → Read More
The popularity of rich media publishing (such as podcasting and videocasting, the YouTube phenomenon, etc.) is a problem for search engines and people trying to use search engines to find this content. The problem is that the traditional ways search engines index and rank content don’t apply to rich media because, well, it’s not easily indexable. A few startups are focusing on creating transcriptions of podcasts and video content (see Pluggd and Podzinger, for example), which search engines can then index. And many people are tagging audio, video and photo content. YouTube, Flickr and others allow this (and see Google’s efforts to tag photos using humans). Tags help describe the content and are usable by search engines as well as humans. But highest level tags, when they are present, don’t capture all of the content, so a lot is missed. Figuring out how to search the meta data around rich content (tags and lots of other descriptive data) is big business. Truveo, a video search startup that launched in 2005 and was subsequently acquired by AOL for at least $50 million, helped solve this problem (but still falls woefully short of perfect). A new unlaunched startup, CastTV, takes rich media searching another few steps forward (much more on them in a later post). But even these new search companies can’t find all of the content in a video or audio file, and certainly can’t take you right to where that content is presented. That’s why I like the idea of deep tagging. It requires human labor but for many publishers it’s worth it. Instead of simply being associated with a file, a deep tag is associated with a clip from the file. Click on the tag and jump right to that part of the clip. We’ve covered a few companies that are facilitating deep tagging, such as MotionBox, JumpCut (acquired by Yahoo last week), Viddler and Click.tv. Also, Google recently added a captioning feature to video, as well as the ability to permanently link to any time spot in a clip. Veotag is doing this as well (we haven’t covered them yet but a few commenters have pointed them out in the past). Today I received an email from Howard Seibel, Veotag’s VP Marketing. He pointed me to this page which is a better version of a TalkCrunch podcast I recorded last week with Om Malik and Robert Scoble. He’s → Read More
There have been big changes in the online video space since I wrote a comparison post of the companies in the space (Flickrs of Video) last November. Some things haven’t changed: Flickr still hasn’t released a video product, and YouTube (TechCrunch posts here) is still the reigning champ of online video with just massive traffic growth and mindshare. But new tools are coming out to make sharing videos online even easier. Both Video Egg and Grouper (TechCrunch posts here and here) have downloadable clients that allow encoding to flash on the desktop (saving users from uploading very large files to the service) and some very basic editing features. Grouper also allows users to string together multiple video files (VideoEgg does not yet allow this). Also, while working from the desktop is easier than online, you must install the software. Grouper is not available on the Mac. VideoEgg has a Mac client that works with Safari, but I cannot get it to install on my new Intel based Mac. New service Motionbox, which will launch in the next few weeks, goes way beyond all of this. CEO Chris O’Brien and investor Derek Idemoto came by to demo the service to me last week and, well, I’m impressed. Motionbox doesn’t have a client uploader like Grouper and VideoEgg. You must upload the full video files to the service. And while those uploads are a pain, Motionbox has very good reasons for doing this. To get what Motionbox is doing, take a YouTube and add a ton of really great editing, mashup and deep tagging features. Like YouTube, Motionbox transcodes files to flash to reduce file size and standardize viewing. But they also store the original files and allow you or those you authorize to download those files and/or purchase DVDs with the files. Editing and Mashups I also had a chance to test MotionBox’s video editiing tools. When editing a video, Motionbox breaks it down visually into frames (see screenshot above). Users can edit the file extensively, including linking several video files and removing any portion(s) of files. Mashups with other users’ public or shared videos can also be created using this editing feature. Frankly, this goes way beyond what anyone else is doing, including VideoEgg and Grouper’s current offerings. All of these changes can be pushed back to the original quality files for downloading or DVD burning. Deep Tagging Like YouTube → Read More
