Background
I had an idea a while ago to try and build a Netflix for your home movies…
Growing up, my Dad always had his camcorder out whenever we had a family outing. It was this big ol’ shoulder-mounted VHS recorder that looked like this guy.
Fun fact: My first experience pirating movies was using that camcorder and a VCR to dub movies from Blockbuster 😂
Anywho, we moved on from that to a MiniDV recorder that we bought from Sears (remember them?), which was a lot smaller and easier for me personally to run around with as a kid. Also look at all those buttons lol.
Today we’ve probably got around a hundred or so tapes scattered around the house, never to be seen again unless…
- We dig out those camcorders or a VCR and try to get them running.
- Even if we do, if we actually wanted to rip them to a computer we’d need a Firewire for the MiniDV camera if we want to bring it straight into a computer, and barring that we’d need a capture card to accept the RCA output.
- Even when it’s on your computer, it’s a PITA to actually chop it all up and then share it on social media which is obviously what you’re trying to do at some point if you’ve gone through all this trouble already.
Lots of hassle, but pretty high upside considering you’ve unlocked a treasure trove of personal nostalgia, especially when there’s not much to be happy about in quarantine. I’d wager there’s a good number of people out there who are dealing with the same problem and want an easy solution.
So one day I’m noodling on this and thinking about how my parents’ Nest cam works. At the root it’s just a Wifi-enabled camera streaming to a Nest server and the feed gets saved on their storage and simultaneously sent back to your phone.
And then I’m like…
“Oh snap! The stream just takes a video input, so why can’t that video input be a capture card!? And then you can just plug in your camcorder to the capture card and stream to the cloud and your phone at the same time! And if you’re streaming it to the cloud, you can save it to the cloud, and there’s all these crazy new AI video processing services now that can analyze the video for you, so we can use those to do scene detection and facial recognition and metadata tagging and then you can turn it into your own personal Netflix!"
-Rico In the Car Having An Epiphany
So yeah, all those kind of connected at once and I got really excited, so I wrote up this press release to make it a little more concrete 😊
Press Release
Introducing Scrapbook – A video capture device and streaming service that lets customers save VHS home movies to their personal, encrypted cloud and watch them from anywhere.
Scrapbook Capture is a standalone, wifi-connected device that takes input from any analog device (including VCRs and video cameras) and saves the video directly to the cloud for viewing and sharing.
The Scrapbook platform’s proprietary, AI-powered encoding pipeline features scene detection, facial recognition, noise reduction, and meta-tagging to organize content for fast searching and sharing clips with family and friends through social media, email, or text message.
Scrapbook’s encrypted streaming service provides high resolution and maximum security, while allowing customers to search for specific videos in their library through their phone or web browser. It also provides a leanback experience that is automatically assembled for their viewing based on person, theme, or chronology.
The all-new Scrapbook, available for pre-order today at myscrapbook.io/preorder
July 25, 2019 09:00 AM Pacific Daylight Time
LOS ANGELES – Scrapbook today announced that it has launched the Scrapbook Platform, a video capture device and streaming memory preservation service that lets customers save VHS home movies to their personal, encrypted cloud that can be viewed on any device.
Scrapbook’s goal is to help people unlock the hours of memories buried in their garages and dens, currently trapped inside VHS tapes. While other services like Legacybox force consumers to risk damage to or loss of their most treasured artifacts by shipping them to strangers, Scrapbook allows you to memorialize your most important memories right from home.
“VHS tapes weren’t made to last forever, with the average tape deteriorating 10-20% in quality starting at about the 10 year mark. 10 years seems like a long time, but 2009 was 10 years ago, and your average VHS tape is way older than that,” said Rico Moorer, Founder and CEO. “There are entire generations worth of history and memories captured on tape and other physical mediums that are at risk of disappearing. We wanted to provide a product that solves this problem and gives people confidence that their memories will be preserved forever.”
The Scrapbook Capture device seeks to reduce the complicated process of capturing, transcoding, and storing video from a traditional capture card into a few easy steps. It is a small, standalone box that connects to your home wifi and can be controlled through your phone or web browser. To use the Scrapbook Capture, just plug it in, connect to the device with your phone or browser, hook up your analog device, and get started.
It takes an RCA input from any analog device, and with one touch will stream the video live to your phone or browser while saving a copy to your personal Scrapbook server. “It’s pretty wild to see a 30-year-old VHS tape of your first dance recital streaming live to your iPhone,” said one beta customer.
Once your video has been saved to the cloud, it is automatically cut into clips and scanned for faces, themes, and objects, making it easy for you to search, catalog, and share with your family and friends. As you discover other people in your videos, Scrapbook also has the ability to tag people and share your clips with them. The Scrapbook streaming service assembles all of your memories in one place, and allows the customer to search through videos, play them at random, or assemble a playlist.
Pricing and Availability
You can pre-order Scrapbook for $199.99 which includes a free 3 month subscription to their streaming service, after which the cost will be $5.99 a month to keep your content stored securely.
Customers wanting to opt out of these services or simply wanting more redundancy will always have the option to download their videos to their computer and/or preferred online backup service through the Scrapbook interface.
For more information, visit www.myscrapbook.io/product.