In the ever increasingly complex world of company buyouts, Snapfish announced on Monday their purchase of Motionbox, a video platform for families and friends to share their memories online. To make things even more complex, this actually comes shortly after Motionb0x acquired the highly successful personal video blogging service Viddyou in October. While this may seem like a bold move for Snapfish, which deals mostly in printing and sharing photographs, it is upon closer inspection, a natural evolution for the company (which was bought out by computer giant HP in 2005). What Snapfish has realized is that even though photos are important ways to store and share memories, it’s no secret that with the dwindling cost of high end cameras and a veritable bevy of software to edit them with, that people have begun to turn to video as their main way of sharing memories with loved ones.  At the same time, not everyone wants that video to be seen by thousands of complete strangers on sites like YouTube and Facebook, which is one of the biggest reasons for Motionbox’s existence. This same idea also held a lot of promise as an upgrade to Snapfish’s service, so HP naturally decided to join the fray by buying the already developed technology of Motionbox.

As for the site itself, HP says the “current Motionbox site” will remain open until August 10, after which the service will be moved over to Snapfish.com. Unfortunately this means that for users of  Motionbox, their videos will need to be downloaded from the site before it moves over to Snapfish. Thankfully, for this trouble, Snapfish is giving Motionbox Premium members a free year of Snapfish’s video service.

We discovered a new video-sharing site producers might enjoy. Share My HD by Motionbox is geared towards sharing, storing and editing HD video… free. Motionbox recently upgraded storage from 300MB to 1GB, which could be up to 2 hours of footage, depending on your format. Not too bad for free storage. Upgrading to a Motionbox Premium account for about $30 gives you unlimited storage, a nice plus for video producers working in a small town like Videomaker’s headquarters who need to share videos with their L.A. partners.
Users of the free account have an unlimited sharing capacity and online editing, while the upgraded program allows for larger file uploads and unlimited high-quality downloads, along with nice high-quality playback. You can keep your account private, share it with a select few or share with the world; it’s your choice. We did a quick test upload and found the site and directions easy to follow and very intuitive. Read the rest of this entry »