Dust Off Those Digital Camcorders!

Not too long ago, digital camcorders were all the rage. After the digital camera boom, it naturally followed that electronics manufacturers would evolve their new cameras into ones that could shoot videos, leading to consumers wanting to replace their oh-so-last-century tape-based camcorders. You probably received or gave one of those slick (and expensive) new digital camcorders not too many holiday seasons ago. But they aren’t so hot anymore. I looked on Amazon’s top sellers list in Electronics, and there was only one digital camcorder in the top 50 (and that was a very inexpensive model). People aren’t replacing them like they do digital cameras. The reason is not that they aren’t prone to breaking or obsolescence, it’s because people aren’t using their old ones anywhere near their original expectations; they feel like the original investment in one was bad, and they don’t want to make that mistake again. You didn’t buy a new one this holiday season, did you? Everybody loves to watch videos and shooting a movie is as easy as can be. So what went wrong?

If you have a digital camcorder, you know what the main problems are: 1. storage, and 2. delivery to friends. Videos are large files and they chew through your memory cards very quickly. Even though camera memory is cheaper than it used to be, it is still costs $25-$50 per hour of video camcorder storage. So you naturally want to offload the storage to your computer. But then you find that you start to run out of space on your hard drive. You see the effects of digital TV, movies, and videos all over the place: on your DVR, on your video iPod, and on all of your computers. That digital camcorder is so fun and easy to use, but the results quickly zap all of your storage. The second main problem may be an even bigger one. You’ve got all this great video content (assuming you had a place to put it), but now you can’t seem to share it with your friends and family since the video files are too big for email. They are too big to upload to YouTube and, in fact, as you get them off your camcorder, they are too big for most people to play over the Internet, even if you could make them available. Most existing video websites require that you first compress your video into lower quality of shorter duration. And then, those websites make your videos available for the world to see. Even if you jumped through the hoops to get your videos YouTube-ready, do you really want your daughter’s ballet recital to be shown to the entire world of unknown viewers?

At Intraware, we are attempting to solve these problems. We provide solutions for storing, organizing, and securely delivering your digital files. On zAthlete.com, you can upload your original video, no matter what the size, and our servers will store your original file for you and make a transformed copy that is suitable for playing over the Internet. Further, zAthlete allows you to organize the videos, along with photos, links, and other types of documents into albums, and then entitle which friends and family may to access to those albums.

So dust off that digital camcorder and try uploading a video from it to zAthlete.com. You might already have something cool trapped on the memory card just waiting to be shared. If you find that it is easy enough to securely offload your videos and share them with others, that camcorder might just end up being the shiny cool toy that you originally thought it would be.

Paul Martinelli, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Intraware