3 Ways to Get Videos of the Kids to Grandma

“Send me the movie,” my mother says when I tell her I just took an adorable iPhone video of her six-year-old grandson. If only it was easy. Photos, sure: You can email them straight from the iPhone’s library. Videos? No such luck. You can share tiny snippets from videos via email or MMS, or upload vids from your phone to YouTube and share from there, but if you want to share a full iPhone video directly, Apple doesn’t (yet) make it easy.

Joya lets you create a list of people who will get whatever videos you add to your “stream.”

This missing capability is an opportunity that entrepreneurs are pursuing. If you’ve got grandparents in your life and want to keep them happy, or just want an easier way to privately share videos with a few people, without relying on a large public service like YouTube, here are three new apps you might want to check out.

Burst is the go-to app if you’re aiming to share vids of kids playing sports. The app has a cool editing feature that zooms and slows video  playback when you tap an on-screen moment, like your kid scoring a goal. Burst also makes it very easy to add individuals to the list of those who will receive a video, and it keeps track of who you’ve sent to so sending them future videos is very easy.

Cloudee, from Boxee, is simpler. You can take a video with the app, or select one from your phone’s library, and when you add it to a “collection” in the app, the people you’ve subscribed to the collection will get an update notification, and be able to watch the video. I found the list management confusing at first, but I did successfully share a few videos with the service. It made my mom happy.

The new Joya is a a very early-stage app with an incomplete feature set, but it’s worth a shot as it’s laser-focused on sharing videos quickly with a small, mostly unchanging network of close contacts. The app is so focused on sharing that it doesn’t even have a link to the iPhone’s camera app; the founders say that most family videos are captured from the lock screen, the fastest way into the video recorder. But when it comes time to share, they say, there is no faster way to select a video and get it to your family or friends than their app.

There are, of course, other solutions for sharing videos. If you use a sync service like Dropbox, you can send links from there, for example. But I appreciate the focus on speed and usability (not completely successful, but improving) from these three family-focused, video-specific sharing apps.

I’ll add that it’s been a big mystery to me why it’s taken so long for apps that do this to appear. Perhaps developers have been holding off, expecting Apple itself to offer this function — which it should have by now. Joya’s Michal Bortnik also told me that the costs of providing a video sharing service are falling fast. “There’s a price war going on, and if you get to real scale, then it’s another order of magnitude lower.” So nobody has to shell out millions to build another YouTube.

It’s a pretty safe bet that, eventually, Apple will offer this service. But why wait? These apps provide this missing feature today.

-Rafe

See also:
Perch: Surveillance with a Heart
Socialcam
Viddy

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