Wish the World Could See Your Home Videos? Share Them Online!

Years ago, home movies were just little rolls of film stored in boxes on a shelf in the family room. To look at them, you had to drag out the movie screen, set up the projector at just the right distance, plug it in, carefully thread the film through the guides on the projector, then turn off the lights and hope that the film didn’t break. But thanks to the popularity of the camcorder in the early 1980s, people suddenly had an easier way to capture memories on film, as well as a simpler way to view them later. And thanks to the digital video revolution of the last few years, home videos have become almost as popular as photograph albums, and a whole lot easier to create and store.

Now the ease of home videos has advanced even further. Most digital cameras sold since 2004 can shoot at least a few minutes of video, and even some cellular phones can. Video cameras have steadily dropped in price, and now a video camera often costs less than a good 35mm camera. CVS Corp. even sells disposable video cameras. With the booming popularity of making your own home movies, people are accumulating massive amounts of personal videos documenting vacations, weddings, children, holidays, and practically every moment that they feel should be preserved for eternity.

But what to do with all those hours of video if you want to share them with friends and family? Thanks to the digital video revolution, most home movies are now recorded digitally, so they can be shared digitally online. Instead of sending a bulky movie file via e-mail that may take hours to download, you can share your personal videos online. There are many sites willing to accept videos for public display, and soon the sharing of personal videos will be just as commonplace as photo sharing is.

One of the leaders of the online video revolution is Vimeo, created almost a year ago by Jakob Lodwick and brought to life when he teamed up with Zach Klein, a former co-worker from Connected Ventures. Soon after their enterprise began attracting attention, the competition heated up. "For the past six months or so, a lot of these sites have been popping up," said Lodwick. "It went from being none to there being new ones every couple of weeks."

Videos run the gamut from serious documentaries to hilarious slapstick, and everything in between. YouTube.com, one of the most popular video sharing sites, had more than 3 million visitors in December, nearly three times the number of hits in November. YouTube Inc. says its users have been sharing 20,000 new videos each day, and watching up to 10 million videos a day. Peruse the clips and you may see an elephant walking down a street in Bangkok, a teenager skateboarding, a cheerleading team dancing, a rowdy pool party, or even a woman burping in front of a mirror. Many videos are carefully produced and edited, and some are even set to music.

Musicians and enterprising young filmmakers can promote their handiwork, but most of the videos posted online are just everyday moments captured by regular folks. Most people don’t bother to delve into the tech-savvy skills required to make their movies rival big-screen features, although there are certain sites, such as AtomFilms.com, that cater to budding professional short film makers. Some of the short films shown on AtomFilms have even won movie industry awards.

The most popular video sites encourage subscribers to share their videos with the world. Videos are grouped by most watched or highest rated, and most sites let users assign keywords to their clips so other site visitors can find their video in a search.

The only drawback video sharing sites are beginning to recognize is that the traditional revenue model of free subscriptions doesn’t work as well for video as it does for photo sharing, because the file sizes can be tremendous. And huge file sizes can consume 10 times as much storage and bandwidth, even after compressing files and reducing resolution. Just this month, CBS Corp. began offering some shows through Google, which lets amateurs and professionals alike charge viewers for video, with Google getting a cut.

So a newer sites are beginning to rely on paid subscriptions. Hewlett-Packard Co.’s Snapfish charges $25 a year for its video-sharing service, even though its photo sharing service is free. But both of the company’s sites are closed communities, where a site visitor must already have a link to watch. Another gray area the various services are trying to work out is copyrights and trademarked material, such as using copyrighted background music. Entertainment lawyers feel that copyright owners probably will not go after amateur moviemakers for using their material, but once a video becomes an overnight sensation that will attract the public eye, the creator could potentially be charged with copyright violations.

So although there are still a lot of details to be worked out, and more will emerge as video sharing sites continue to grow and develop, the idea of sharing home videos online is already cemented as an Internet craze. "It is a new frontier," says Steven Starr, Revver's chief executive. "The migration of video onto the network is upon us, and the rules of that migration are being worked out as we speak."

Thanks to faster and faster Internet connections and better online video technology, even powerhouse Internet giants such as Google and Yahoo! are getting into the game. "People have video all over the place, coming out of their ears," says Cynthia Francis, chief executive of Reality Digital Inc., which runs the ClipShack video sharing site. "People are looking for a way to share that." To many people, video sharing is the greatest thing to hit the Internet. Everybody wants to share their videos with an audience and the bigger the audience, the better. With online sharing, your audience is the world.