Storage options for consumers certainly aren’t limited to in-home hardware solutions today as several online companies are stepping forward with innovative applications that are turning hours of video and thousands of stills in to viewable, and more importantly, enjoyable DVDs that your customers will watch again and again. And new Web 2.0 technologies are behind much of the excitement in this market.
We’ve mentioned these guys in this space in the past and have been absolutely wowed by their solutions as San Francisco-based Pictureal (www.pictureal.com) offers a real wiz-bang online solution whereby consumers send them hours of video and hundreds of stills and get back an hour-long DVD compilation of all those memories in movie form, complete with a Hollywood-style movie poster featuring highlights of what the customer sent in.
“There needs to be a quantum leap in revenue generation,” says Yogesh Sharma, Pictureal founder. “Even the photosharing companies don’t turn a profit. Why? Because they make it hard for people to do anything on their site! Customers don’t want to spend 45 minutes customizing photo books. They want, ‘Here it is. Click. Order.’”
Sharma’s idea with Pictureal is to provide a service that takes a customers video and digital images (in any format) and turns them into a variety of finished products, from slideshows to feature-film style DVD’s. “There are billions of hours of video sitting in shoeboxes, and bazillions of magical moments in there. Families need to say, ‘Wow, it’s cheap (for you to do the editing for me)? Here’s all my tapes.”
Pictureal recently told us this solution is ready for retail in the form of a kiosk, with charges ranging in the $99 area for turning approximately three hours of raw home video footage into an “uncannily good encapsulation” (Sharma’s description of the resulting movie DVD), $179 for 6 hours.
As Sharma recently told Picture Business, “We look for smiles and a general theme of good times.” Sounds like a solid formula to us.
Then there is Scottsdale, AZ-based iMemories, a company that bills itself as a leader in Web 2.0 Internet services. This company offers a similar service and, as is the case with Pictureal, the user can either have iMemories do al the work or they can visit the site and organize the content the company has uploaded and make their own final DVD. There apparently is a rather large audience out there for services like this as iMemories claims they have already transformed more than 75,000 old home movies, photos and slides into digitally mastered DVDs in less than 2 years.
The company recently signed a 3-year data networking agreement with Quest Communications International to install their HYPERLINK “http://www.qwest.com/largebusiness” Qwest Metro Optical Ethernet (QMOE) at iMemories’ Scottsdale, Ariz., headquarters. The Ethernet technology will give iMemories scalable bandwidth and a secure and reliable network to share digital images with clients over the Web. Because of the flexibility and scalability of Qwest’s services, iMemories will use only the amount of bandwidth it needs at a certain time.
“The beauty of Qwest Ethernet is that it starts at 10 Megabits per second (Mbps) but can easily scale to reach 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps), giving iMemories the flexibility to grow to meet the anticipated demand for their product,” said Tom Richards, executive vice president of Business Markets for Qwest. “These scalable bandwidth increments also mean that iMemories only pays for the bandwidth they use, which is particularly attractive to a young, rapidly growing company.” It will also allow iMemories to continue offer this service at a competitive rate to consumers.
