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.
The Johnson Blog 
Comments
8 responses to “MotionBox Sold to Snapfish”
you are so right! GGRRRR – and looking for an alternative, too! HELP!
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Vimeo Plus it is. Commencing 10GB of uploading.
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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
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