Motionbox

» see motionbox.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

by 2007 my video habit was already youtube, so motionbox was a us answer to a question youtube had mostly closed. it was a sharing site with a twist, you could edit the clip in the browser first, trim it and stitch pieces together before anyone saw it. that was clever in 2006. it was also aimed at a smaller idea than youtube's, video you wanted to show your family and not the planet.

chris o'brien and andrew wason founded it in new york in 2006. it leaned on privacy controls, share this reel with these people and no one else, which read as the opposite of youtube's shout-to-everyone default. it added high-definition playback in 2008 and raised around seventeen million dollars. for a couple of years it had a real reputation among people who cared about video quality.

none of that reached me, and it was not built to. this was an american product for american families organizing birthday clips, a use i did not have on a turkish connection where uploading video at all was still a slow proposition. i knew the browser-editing idea mattered. i just met it later, inside youtube, when it finally copied the trick.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

motionbox got the press right for a while. the browser editor was genuinely ahead of its time, letting you cut a clip without any software installed, back when video editing meant a heavy program and an afternoon. the privacy-first framing found a real audience among parents and small groups who did not want their footage public. the money followed, several rounds and a former venture investor stepping in as ceo.

~ how it actually ended ~

hewlett-packard owned snapfish, a photo-printing service, and in july 2010 it bought motionbox to add video to that. the standalone site did not survive the deal. on august 10, 2010 motionbox shut down and told its users to export their videos before the site went dark. the technology disappeared into snapfish's larger photo business, where the browser editor that once looked like the future became a small feature nobody remembers.

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