Great things are happening at Motionbox! Last week, we officially launched our new video hosting solution for professional bloggers, organizations, and businesses: Motionbox PRO.
Motionbox PRO provides a comprehensive video hosting solution that includes archival storage, web-based editing, streaming and embedding, all in superior quality, up to 1080p HD. Commercial customers will receive best-in-the-industry support for HD formats and pricing that is significantly lower than that of competitors in the commercial video sharing market.
Motionbox is now sponsoring How Did You Know, MentalFloss.com's monthly 5-day trivia hunt!
What does this mean? Each month, we'll be giving out some pretty awesome prizes to the winners of How Did You Know on MentalFloss.com. Prizes include free 1-year Motionbox Premium memberships and Vado 8GB HD video cameras! There are great benefits to both prizes, including being able to shoot and share your personal video with your friends and family for free.
We're currently already on Day 3 of this month's trivia hunt, so hurry on over!
VCRs are a thing of the past. Don't let your memories fade out with them! Arkiva, a new Motionbox partner, will transfer your home movies from almost any video format to DVD and upload them to Motionbox! Once uploaded to Motionbox, you'll be able to share those personal home videos with all of your friends and family online. As an added bonus, Motionbox members will receive 10% off any Arkiva purchase. Just use coupon code: MOTION at checkout.
A few months ago, we told you that you could watch your Motionbox videos on the go, by accessing our website from your iPhone, remember?
Now, we're happy to let you know that we have a brand new iPhone app which allows you to access all of your folders on Motionbox and play all your videos. This application is definitely at an early stage and we hope our existing users who have iPhones will try it out and send us their feedback!
You'll be able to download it from iTunes here. We'll continue to add features and make improvements, so if you have any comments or suggestions, just send them our way!
Don't let the title fool you -- this is nothing but good news for everyone! There have been some big changes around Motionbox lately, one of which being our new partnership with Shutterfly. Even though that was (and is!) a big deal for us, we'd like to welcome with open arms the newest addition to Motionbox: Viddyou!
"[...]It is with great pride that we are able to join Motionbox to enhance our vision of creating a high-quality easy-to-use destination for the personal video sharing community," said Viddyou founder and CEO Aaron Wadler.
But that's not just it. We definitely appreciate what Viddyou has contributed to the online video-sharing world: "Motionbox has been very impressed by the great user experience and video technology that Viddyou has built, along with a loyal customer base," said Josh Grotstein, Motionbox CEO.
We're happy that the Viddyou community is joining our tried and true customer base and are working to make this transition as smooth as possible for Viddyou customers. This is a time of growth for Motionbox, so all of our customers, both new and old, can expect even greater changes in the future. Stay tuned!
If you're already a Motionbox member, you can now connect your Motionbox account to your existing Facebook account. Simply click on the "Facebook Connect" button on the right hand side of your Motionbox Profile page.
Once your Motionbox account is connected to your Facebook account, you can set your Facebook Application settings so that all of your new Open Access videos on Motionbox immediately get posted to your Facebook wall and show up in your friends' news feeds. This free Motionbox app will be a great way for you to share some videos with your Facebook friends, without having to send them e-mails or manually posting the videos to Facebook. And if you have any personal videos you wouldn't want to share with your Facebook friends, all you have to do is mark them as Private instead of Open Access.
This feature is still in Beta, so your feedback is greatly appreciated. We've got a lot more coming in the future, so stay tuned!
For a while now, your videos on Motionbox wouldn't retain new sort order once you left your folder's page, and the only way to permanently re-order videos was to do it manually. Now, we finally have a way to easily (and "permanently") re-order your videos inside of a folder. Give it a try:
1. Go inside the folder containing the videos you want to re-order. 2. Click on the "Reorder By" link above the list of videos. 3. You'll have five different options from the drop-down menu: Newest First, Oldest First, Title A-Z, Title Z-A, or Reorder Manually. Choose your preference.
Now, the order of your videos won't change until you re-order them again.
Folder Sorting
You'll be able to change the order of your folders on your Folders Page too! Many users didn't like seeing their oldest folders at the top of the page, so they'll be able to easily change that.
Just click the "Reorder By" link above your list of folders and you'll see the same five options in the drop down menu. Motionbox will retain the folder order for you even after you leave your folders page or log out.
Your Friends and Family
Now, even your viewers will be able to sort your folders and videos, so watching your videos will be easier for them. They'll see a "Sort By" link instead of the "Reorder By" link that you see though, and their sorting changes will be temporary and only seen by them.
We hope these new sorting methods will not only make storing your personal videos on Motionbox easier, but sharing too! Have any questions or comments? Let us know.
Good news! You'll now see a "Trim" icon on all of your video play pages on Motionbox. Our new Trim feature lets you trim your personal video quickly and easily, without having to go to the Mixer to clip off the boring parts that you don't want in your video.
To trim your video, here's all you have to do:
1. Click on the "Trim" button on your video's play page (It's next to the Delete, Rotate, Email and Favorite icons). You'll be taken to our new Trim Video (Beta) page.
2. Drag the handles to the start and end of your selection. Whatever is within the green bar is what will stay in your video.
3. Click the "Play" button to preview your edits.
4. You'll then have two choices: "Save" and "Save As New Video." If you click "Save," your edits will save over your old video and replace it. Don't do this if you don't want to lose the original! If you click "Save As New Video" though, we'll save this cut for you as a new video in your account, without replacing the old one.
Your edited video will then start optimizing for playback on the web. You don't have to stay on this page at all - feel free to come back to it later once the video has finished processing, and enjoy! You can then start sharing your new, trimmed with all your friends and family to enjoy too.
PS: This is a free new feature we've added to Motionbox, so both Basic and Premium members will get to enjoy it.
PPS: Please note that this feature is still in Beta. If you experience anything that doesn't seem right, feel free to let us know! We'd definitely love to hear your feedback as we work on this new feature.
If you've been waiting to upgrade to Motionbox Premium, now's the time to do so! We're currently running a special promotion that gives you a free DVD order when you upgrade to Premium. Use it to put your personal video collection on a DVD to watch on your TV or share as a gift! Motionbox DVDs currently cost $19.99, so this is a pretty sweet deal.
If you have any friends that are thinking of upgrading too, be sure to let them know, as this promotion is for a limited time only (about one week).
Just go to Motionbox.com on your iPhone browser. On the top of the page, you'll see an option to use Motionbox on your iPhone: "On a mobile device? Use our mobile-enhanced site." Click on that link and you'll be prompted to log in to your mobile Motionbox page.
It's as simple as that!
Once you click on the thumbnail of a video, the video will start encoding for playback on your phone - but this will just happen once for each video and the process time is pretty quick.
You've been asking for it. And when we said we were working on it, we weren't joking!
You can now rotate your videos after uploading them to Motionbox. We all sometimes shoot video holding the camera the wrong way, and now you have an easy way to fix the orientation of your videos after uploading them! Here's how you can do it:
1. Go to the play page of your video on Motionbox.
2. On the upper-right-hand side of the page, you'll now see 5 different buttons (Delete, Rotate, Mixer, Email, and Favorite). Click on the "Rotate" button.
3. You'll be taken to a new Rotate video page. Use the arrow buttons below the video player to rotate your video.
4. Click on the "Save Changes" button. Your video will then save in its new orientation.
Here's an example of when you might want to use the rotate tool. Check out Julia's walk to the bus stop on her first day of Kindergarden:
Before:
After:
Give it a try! Actually, even if you don't need to rotate your video, check it out anyway - It's actually quite fun to watch your videos playback sideways (just don't save the changes). =P
Motionbox now has an official (new) page on Facebook, so check us out!
The fans we have on there right now are feeling kind of lonely, so help spread the word and become a fan of Motionbox on Facebook today! Here's an easy way to do it too - you won't even need to go on Facebook, just click the "Become a Fan" button below.
Recently, videos that were taken with the iPhone oriented upright (instead of sideways) had some issues after uploading/emailing them to Motionbox. The good news is that we've made some changes, and if you had any trouble with the rotation of your iPhone videos on Motionbox recently, you shouldn't have any trouble from here on! The problem is solved and your iPhone videos will encode just fine now.
Please re-upload any videos that you had trouble with, and if you have any questions, just let us know!
Have a ton of videos on your cell phone that you end up deleting when you run out of space? What's the point of shooting videos from your phone when no one gets to watch them anyway?!
Motionbox has a special, hidden feature some of you might not know about: Mobile Uploads.
Your Motionbox account has a unique “video phone” email address that you can personalize to your liking. So next time you shoot a video from your cell phone, don't let it just sit there! Simply send it to your Motionbox video phone email address and it'll be online in your Motionbox account next time you log in. Then, you can share it with friends and family or just keep it in your Motionbox account so you have a place to save it!
Here's how you can find out what your Motionbox video phone e-mail address is:
Once you're signed into Motionbox, click on "Your Motionbox" on the top-right hand side of any page.
Click on "Account Settings" from the drop-down menu.
Then, click on "Communication Preferences."
You'll see your video phone e-mail address right there! You can actually customize part of it to make it easier for you to remember.
Try it out and finally enjoy those cell phone videos!
Good news! You'll now see a "Trim" icon on all of your video play pages on Motionbox. Our new Trim feature lets you trim your personal video quickly and easily, without having to go to the Mixer to clip off the boring parts that you don't want in your video.
If you've been waiting to 
You can now play Motionbox videos on your iPhone!
You've been asking for it. And when we said we were working on it, we weren't joking!
Have a ton of videos on your cell phone that you end up deleting when you run out of space? What's the point of shooting videos from your phone when no one gets to watch them anyway?!
