Project Brief To build a complete product to enable consumers to store and watch online their entire home video collections and to share access to some or all of their collections with trusted friends and family (but no one else). Execution We built the entire FamilyCam.com front and back end based on a customised version of our online video platform. The FamilyCam.com web site is extremely easy to use but its apparent simplicity masks a very robust, secure and highly sophisticated solution. With FamilyCam, users can store very large quantities of full length home camcorder movies and legacy cine films. Part of the model is to provide a professional media digitisation service to help users import their existing family movie collections from tape, cine and DVD media formats.
Background The mission of FamilyCam Limited, founded in 2008, is to make it as easy as possible for its members to enjoy and to organise their full-length home movies and share them securely with trusted friends and family members located anywhere in the world. Features & Technical FamilyCam gives its users instant broadband access to their entire home movies collections, enabling them to organise it all and to know that it's all stored safely and securely ready to browse, watch and share at exceptional quality whenever they want. FamilyCam also provides its own version of the Doovle movie maker and uploading software to enable all its users to upload videos in almost any digital format to their FamilyCam collections, including movies shot on mobile phones and pocket digital cameras. Many people who buy hard-drive camcorders or who capture video on other digital devices have difficulty dealing with the cascade of video clips they create on such cameras. The FamilyCam upload software solves this problem because it lets people stitch together multiple video files to create perfect movies and then upload them. One of the pivotal innovations incorporated into FamilyCam is a suite of scene tagging tools to enable users to write short descriptive tags about different scenes in their movies. Users and their invited guests can then run searches for scenes they've tagged so they can jump to those scenes instantly and enjoy them. The Familycam scene tagging and search technology was developed by Doovle. Another innovation unique to FamilyCam is its emphasis on giving all its users their own personal Internet home video channel. The Familycam website is where users sign up and manage their accounts and movies, but to watch the movies themselves, users open up their own personal video channel which is designed to display perfectly on PCs, Macs and HDTV screens. Comment Dr Michael Woodley, Doovle Founder and CTO commented: "The days are gone when the excitement of watching cine reels with a projector in the living room was sufficient reward to justify the effort. Today, people shoot family video so easily that the comparative effort of later finding the right scene on the right tape or disc and watching it seems to be too much. Everyone in the family can shoot it but the magic of presenting it has somehow been lost. "With FamilyCam, we can change that and we want to rekindle the excitement of the magic lantern show in the living room. Having a FamilyCam channel is meant to be a life-long project and one that members will pass on to their heirs, so that eventually generations are spanned. "When several members of a family each have their own FamilyCam channel, this opens a new dimension of multiple home video collections all linked together in a family tree. One generation starts the process and subsequent generations inherit and add to what was started. YouTube is where you put funny clips of your skateboarding cat. FamilyCam is a place where you can build an accessible archive of your precious and private family memories." Current Status The FamilyCam service has been undergoing private trials with 50 families whose enthusiasm and feedback has helped refine the product to make it even more compelling and simple to use. Now, FamilyCam is open to the public and any UK resident can sign up free of charge and start using the service. Not surprisingly, the company has produced a set of online videos to introduce the service to new users and to help all users get to grips with some of the more advanced features such as guest sharing, scene tagging and video scene browsing. All users are given one hour of high-quality video storage for free and can then upgrade to a range of subscription packages giving from 10 to 100 hours. All video streaming for users and their invited guests is free and guests can login from anywhere in the world.
