I’ve been a MotionBox Premium user for almost 2 years now, and this evening I received an email saying they sold themselves to Snapfish. Lucky for us, we get to use Snapfish free for a year! If only you could hear my voice, there’s plenty of sarcasm in it.
Offering Snapfish for a year is a joke. Why? Because it in no way compares to what I’ve come to expect from MotionBox. I quickly created a Snapfish account to try it out, but found:
- No HD playback
- No video embedding in other sites like this blog.
- 500 MB video file limit
- 10-minute video limit
Anyone have any suggestions for a replacement? My wishlist (all things I had with MotionBox) is:
- Unlimited number of videos and storage
- No video size limit
- No video length limit
- HD playback
- SD quality fallback for those viewers not on a fast connection
- Embeddable videos
- Automatic transcoding between formats – including iPhone compatible.
- Privacy and sharing features (easy to view by intended recipients)
R.I.P. MotionBox, I think you’ve left plenty of disappointed customers behind.
you are so right! GGRRRR – and looking for an alternative, too! HELP!
A close 2nd that I can think of is Vimeo. With a premium subscription you get unlimited HD streaming and uploading. I however don’t think they off iPhone playback. They do have a HTML5 player.
That’s the one I am leaning toward right now. I would have thought it would be a more crowded space by now, I’m really surprised.
Have you any personal experience with it?
I’ve uploaded a few videos, but since recently acquiring an HD camera I’ve been sticking with YouTube because it’s free, no limit on uploads, and you stream HD.
Keep me posted. Vimeo was 2nd to motionbox for me, haven’t signed up for anything yet.
Haven’t considered youtube, didn’t htink it had privacy features. I know it has a 10 minute limit.
I still haven’t made my mind up on a replacement, but here are the leaders (positives and negatives listed:
Vimeo
————
+ Affordable ($60/year)
+ No video time limit
- 5GB/week uploads
+ HD video
+ Embedding
+ Great reputation, reliable
SmugMug
——————–
+ HD support
- 10 Minute video limit
+/- I just got a tweet saying they upped the limits to 1GB per video
+ I’m already a Power user, so it wouldn’t cost more
Pixorial.com
—————–
+ Affordable ($25/year)
+ “No time limit on videos”…but
- 800 MB file limit
Roll my own
—————–
This is tempting, a combination of Amazon S3 for storage and bandwidth and JWPlayer for viewing on my blog.
- Time/effort
- not fixed cost, storage expense grows over time
– no easy “private” sharing w/ family
That’s it for now. My search continues.
Vimeo Plus it is. Commencing 10GB of uploading.
It is really sad that HP purchased a company that offered such a great product to elimate the competition and offered a product that was so inferior