As I continue my journey to find the flickr of videos, I may have found the (near) perfect product – version 2 of Grouper which launches tonight.
Grouper is only available for windows and requires a download. But it’s worth it. The product is currently free and allows unlimited uploads of photos and video. Each piece of content can be shared with the public, kept private or shared just with a select group of people.
The publisher can also tag content for easy search/find later. And RSS feeds are availble for tags and publishers.
Grouper is a Windows XP based application that allows users to share their personal media with the world and/or safely within private groups. With Grouper users can upload video and photo previews to Grouper.com where anyone can view them and then choose to download them via our distributed download network. Grouper also uses P2P technology to connect you directly to your friends’ hard drives where they can share large media files in a safe, encrypted environment. Grouper is a simple install and requires no firewall reconfiguration.
A key feature is the ability to create your own “Groovies”, or movies. This is a set of tools which allows users to mash up various video clips, photos and music/audio, along with title pages. These basic tools, all free, give users the power to create really cool videos on the fly and share them with others.
Based on the name, I suspected that Grouper was saving them in a proprietary format that could only be viewed on their website or via their client, but there is an option to download and share these files in WMV format. This is absolutely awesome.
I feel as though I’ve only touched the surfact of Grouper, and I’m going to continue to test the product. They just may have set the new standard for video sharing on the web (at least for the windows platform).