Webware

AOL is ending its foray into user-generated video, the company confirmed Monday after a weekend of blog reports. On December 18, its AOL Video Uploads service will officially close its doors.

Users who have videos currently hosted through the service will receive an e-mail this week, and will be given the chance to transfer their videos to AOL's preferred alternative, start-up Motionbox, before December 18. If they don't, their videos will be deleted.

AOL has made a concerted effort to shake off some of its older and less successful properties--Journals, Hometown, and AOL Pictures, to name a few, not to mention the fact that parent company Time Warner plans to spin off its flagging dial-up service--while forging ahead with newer, shinier projects. The company continues to launch new blog titles and beef up its Platform-A advertising product; it's also modified its homepage to bring in feeds from multiple e-mail and social-networking sites.

The Google-owned YouTube remains the overwhelming leader in amateur video uploads.

But AOL's not the only one reworking its service priorities. Earlier this fall, Microsoft announced that it was shutting down its MSN Groups service in favor of starting the new Windows Live Groups, and that MSN Groups would be effectively ported over to social network Multiply.

Today Motionbox is taking an important step forward as a video host. It's now supporting high definition footage uploaded by its premium users, who get to partake in unlimited file size or storage limitations as part of the $30 a year service. Regular users will also notice a quality bump, as the supported resolution has been increased to DVD quality to help meet the now standard VGA quality and beyond on most point-and-shoot cameras.

HD videos can be encoded in any of the popular competing formats, including AVCHD which only recently began to meander into consumer level video editing software suites. Users are also able to edit raw, uncut HD footage in MotionBox's Web-based editing tools. This feature should make it easier and far less expensive for people who want to do simple edits to HD footage without upgrading computer hardware.

The sample clips I've seen are beautiful and load instantly. If you've spent any time on Vimeo and its high definition gallery the experience is similar. Both suffer from the technological shortcoming of not letting embedded clips be in high definition, meaning you'll have to visit the Web site if you want to see for yourself. Update: I've gotten the supersecret embed code to drop the HD player on the page. See update note the end of the post for more information, and click the "read more" link to watch it.

Motionbox is coming to the HD crowd a little late, but it is offering some interesting tandem services to entice prosumers who are looking less at broadcasting to the masses, and more to small groups of friends and family. In a few weeks, MotionBox will launch a custom DVD service that will let users drop clips onto a virtual DVD and have it printed and sent to themselves or to friends. With the right permissions, users will also be able to take your clips and burn them onto a DVD if you make that option available. CEO Chris O'Brien also tells me the flipbooks, which were introduced last November have been enjoyed by users.

If you're a heavy HD user looking to share some HD footage with others on the cheap, Dailymotion and Vimeo serve up free hosting. There are caveats for each though. Dailymotion needs you to be a MotionMaker and broadcast your stuff to everyone, while Vimeo limits your weekly file uploads to 500MB which might be pushing it for some long, raw 1080p footage.

Note: O'Brien says that users will eventually be able to embed the HD videos themselves, but we've been given a special code for this one. Also be sure to vote to see the results in the poll below. Looks like a lot of you don't have HD cameras.

... Read more

Motionbox, a video sharing site we've been tracking for more than a year, is officially exiting its freebie trial period on Tuesday with an optional paid, premium service, and adding a really cute way to view your videos offline.

The offline viewer: Paper flipbooks. All you have to do is select a fifteen-second clip in a video you've uploaded, write some text for your cover, and pony up $8.99 per copy, and Motionbox will send you a little hand-held, paper-based video player. A great gift idea, clearly. CEO Chris O'Brien even joked about a future version that plays audio (sound chips are pretty cheap these days).

Viewers of Motionbox videos can select clips from them to share.

The flipbook gimmick was an excuse for me to take a new look at the Motionbox service. It's a useful resource for posting and sharing videos. It's no YouTube, but it's not supposed to be. The design point is more Shutterfly: It's a place to upload and store videos and then share them with friends and family.

Still, the embeddable Motionbox player has a few tricks. Below the viewing pane, it shows snapshot frames of the video, sort of a live table of contents. Using this timelime, viewers can also select a segment of the vid they're watching and share (by link or e-mail) just that clip.

The Motionbox upload utility is Flash-based and handles large video files gracefully. It can't do anything about your slow upstream video connection, though. Videos are stored at Motionbox in their original resolution, and Motionbox does a small amount of post-processing on them if necessary, like increasing brightness. It may offer more in the future.

Motionbox lets you trim videos and mash them together with its "mixer." The video editor is very easy to use, but also extremely limited in functionality. Yahoo's Jumpcut is a much more robust online editor.

Other services do offer more control and sharing options, but Motionbox's focus on personal and family video makes it an easy recommendation for people looking for a simple way to store and share.

The new premium service, $29.99 a year, will give you unlimited upload space and the capability to stream and download the full-resolution videos you've uploaded. Freebie accounts have only 300MB of storage space and only streaming privileges --no downloads.

From January 29 to 31, the AlwaysOn OnMedia NYC conference filled up the luxe Mandarin Oriental Hotel in midtown Manhattan with "disruptors," but not the kind that would be running around trashing the penthouse suite (at least that wasn't my impression of the crowd). These were, rather, the companies that "blogazine" AlwaysOn chose as its "AO Media 100," the year's featured start-ups that are shaking things up along the fault line between traditional media and the Internet. Most of the panels and presentation series, as well as the AO Media award winners themselves, were primarily for enterprise or advertising clients. But a handful, which we'll be showcasing here on Webware over the next two days, could potentially be quite relevant to your everyday lives--if they aren't already. For example, one set of presentations took a look at consumer-generated content--you know, the stuff everyone's been talking about as the centerpiece of this whole "2.0" thing.

The lineup was a bit incongruous, as three of the presentations were consumer-oriented video start-ups, and the other two were services geared toward the advertising community. Consequently, it was difficult at first to gauge a "feel" for the series other than the fact that it's clear that much of the advertising community is curious about the potential for user-generated content to help them rack up more profits. But in retrospect, things actually did fall together a bit more coherently. The consumer services--Pando, ClipSync, and MotionBox--share a common theme in that they're all start-ups with an eye on making online video fit more cleanly into peoples' offline lives. Essentially, they're companies that emphasize that user-generated video on the Internet is not a fad, but rather something that's become deeply etched into 21st-century culture. And the two advertisers--Vidavee and PayPerPost--are trying to capitalize on amateur video's ubiquity by using it as a route to advertising revenue.

Pando. Launched in 2006, Pando is a downloadable application that, according to CEO Robert Levitan, was designed to "help people share media directly with other people." In other words, this free downloadable application facilitates "super high quality, really really large file transfer" in a way that's faster and more efficient than the file-transfer features in e-mail and instant-messaging clients. Levitan especially marketed it as a tool for the hot web-video market: send your home videos to your family, for example. The revenue model is based on in-application banners, embedded video ads, and a set of premium packages that were recently launched.

ClipSync. Founder Itzik Cohen traces the idea for ClipSync back to his days as a professional basketball player in Israel, where he learned about the value of sharing an experience, whether it be from the bleachers of a sporting event or in an online discussion group. Like Pando, ClipSync is all about sharing videos, but ClipSync's model makes it possible for you to watch online video from a number of sharing sites in synch with friends around the world, and talk about it with an accompanying chat feature. "Entertainment is a social phenomenon," Cohen explained. "It's all about sharing moving experiences." So now, um, I guess you can watch that YouTube clip of the scuba-diving cat while simultaneously laughing at it with your friends across the globe.

MotionBox. Out of all the start-ups in this presentation series, this was the one that was most clearly a product of the meme that user-generated online video isn't just for amateur filmmakers or bored kids trying to get famous. It's an online editing and sharing service that founder Chris O'Brien says is "focused on personal video?the video that all of us shoot in our daily lives." So, MotionBox is for the casual users who want to make their home videos something more coherent, but don't know if they want to tackle FinalCut Express or even iMovie. And it's a real reminder that new technology has made home-video gurus out of all of us.

Vidavee. This was the first of the two media-industry-oriented companies, and certainly the better-received of the pair. CEO Mark Brenner was off to an ambitious start in his presentation, citing that Google had enabled the organization of the Web, Microsoft had enabled the organization of the desktop, and Vidavee was out to enable and organize video. Vidavee is a company that utilizes a combination of "consumer-friendly" ad placement and deep-tagging to help content providers figure out exactly what their consumers want, video-wise. One of Vidavee's dozen clients is liberal blog The Huffington Post, which uses the deep-tagging features to see exactly what parts of the videos viewers were choosing to share. So, while Vidavee doesn't specialize in user-generated ads, the consumer force is certainly integral to its model. And the whole Time "Person of the Year" thing could make that appealing to content distributors.

PayPerPost. Suffice it to say that this is a controversial company. CEO Ted Murphy assured that his company's strategy of matching bloggers up with companies that wanted people to rave about their products was "better for advertisers and better for bloggers," but it's raised some major ethical questions. (You know, payola.) To demonstrate, Murphy showed a video that had been created for a Hewlett-Packard digital camera through PayPerPost: a grainy, YouTube-ish clip of two mischievous-looking kids smashing a (non-HP) digital camera with a hammer. It was cute, and funny, and would probably make a more than decent TV commercial. And it's too bad, because PayPerPost's high-profile "blogger bribery" model is likely making it difficult for the potentially lucrative market of user-generated advertisements to get off the ground.