Boxee has unveiled a new iPhone app that will let users share personal videos from the cloud. The service, called Cloudee, is “the first step towards a Boxee cloud offering.”
“We believe the cloud is going to play a major role in the future of TV and today we are taking the first step towards a Boxee cloud offering. So say hello to Cloudee. We are starting with an invite-only, beta iPhone app for Cloudee that lets you share personal videos with family and close friends.,” wrote Boxee’s Avner Ronen in his personal blog.
“For a while now, it’s been painful to get our personal videos to the TV screen – our Road Trips, Boxee Meetups, family videos with our kids, concerts and the occasional weirdness on NYC streets. Some of these videos were on our phones, others on our laptop or network storage, and the ones we really wanted to see were always taken by our friends. Yes, we could copy videos into a thumb drive, upload to YouTube and set it to private, setup a cloud storage account and give permissions to friends … but it was all too much work, so videos just sat there… never being watched, never being shared.”
This new iPhone app lets users upload videos to Cloudee, organise them into collections and share them with their family and close friends. During the beta period the service is free, but Boxee will later release a paid version with unlimited video storage in the cloud, which you will be able to access from your Boxee Box and any browser.
“The cloud is the natural place for personal videos. We are now capturing videos on connected devices, which makes it easy to upload them directly to the cloud, watch them from anywhere and share them with whomever we like. It doesn’t make sense to continue storing these videos on a hard drive that isn’t universally accessible and runs the risk of crashing or being lost.”
This is only the first step into the cloud for Boxee. Ronen: “We believe more of our video watching will shift towards on demand and secondary screens, which will mean more video coming from the cloud. Cloudee will become an integral part of the Boxee offering and we are very excited about its future.”
During the beta Cloudee requires a Facebook account and an invite.
Broadband TV Views. If Boxee believes the future of TV is in the cloud, we can expect much more disruptive possibilities from the company.
Just recently, Boxee launched an add-on in the US allowing for reception of regular DTT television signals.
By launching a cloud-based video service, network PVR could be an easy next step for Boxee.
