Full Transcript:

Steve Smallman: My name is Steve Smallman, I am the president of stashspace.com. We also operate homemovie.com, which is our original company. We have been around since about 2000. Saw an opportunity way back then for online video, as we all know there were some ups and downs in the growth of broadband, not quite as quickly as we anticipated. We found some ways to hang in there and now it is really coming about.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Well, let’s talk homemovie.com for a moment, because that actually I assume takes a lot of broadband, takes a ton of bandwidth, so tell us a little bit about that service and why broadband is so important?

Steve Smallman: Well, the broadband aspect of it is; a lot of the video sharing sites that are out there are not very high quality, as you probably know. One of the things we are using as a differentiator is high quality. When we trans-code people’s video, we do it in two different bit-rates 350 kilobit and 2.5 megabit, so we have the ability to broadcast in either one, if there is enough, fiber enough bandwidth to allow that. Most of the others out there are far less than either of those. So, as we are here at Killer App Show, we are talking to the bringing fiber to the home groups and with the fiber to the home guys they have got the ability to turn that bandwidth on, they have already got it there. So, they can have a real advantage over the other video sharing sites that are out there by putting an application such as HomeMovie or StashSpace into their network.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Is this an application that they purchase and stick on their network? Do you go direct to the end user? What’s your business model here?

Steve Smallman: With these guys, we do have a direct to the user model, but for the fiber guys, it makes more sense with them to have their own network. We've developed specifically for this show and we were just introducing it for the first time, what we call our Black Box model, which is two and half terabyte server system that goes in network. So, people within that network can all share through that network provider and get back out, through that network provider very, very high quality, nearly DVD quality video. Obviously, you guys are doing some things with some HD which is next thing coming along, we are starting to play around with that as well.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, let’s stop and talk a little bit about more what the application itself is and why you need that much broadband to deliver? I mean you mentioned 2.5 megabits, absolutely, but why do you need that much to do what you are doing?

Steve Smallman: Well, to get the best possible experience for the user. You want to have the video come as quickly as possible, I get a little anxious sometimes when I am on the Internet, I am little fast, double clicking going and "hey, how come this isn’t here", right? Now, with video of course with cashing and trying to get a full stream it takes a lot of bandwidth to get here very quickly. So, that’s a real advantage.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Does that type of bandwidth require fiber, I know that my home Comcast connection, I have got 8 megs down like 512 up?

Steve Smallman: We are talking to the cable and DSL guys as well, with similar models on broader base and they have talked about doing some things in that nature, where they can sense when a big file is coming, but what they want to do is move their subscribers up levels and have reasons for them and subscribers want that as well. To have that, if you are going to pay 24.95 for a basic or 54.95 for the fastest, you are going find lot of people don’t need this, but as video and things that take up more bandwidth come online they will want to move up, so the big advantage for those providers is having that ability at driving that traffic.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, the HomeMovie part is video editing online, in really high quality, archiving everything is really designed for the home users, it is not the uber-tech elite, who are doing the high produced show. This is more for my mother who just has all these tapes of me as kid, who wants to just store them some place permanently.

Steve Smallman: We are very amused, we are talking to a partner and they said, “so, you are mass, not class”. OK, yeah. That’s exactly right, we are for the 99% of the people who don’t want to learn, it is a very steep learning curve to learn the video editing software.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Absolutely.

Steve Smallman: Our is very simple and we try to make it simpler and simpler all the time. As writing dot moves and files from not just camcorders, but from phones and from digital cameras, we have got a new bucket where those things come in just as scenes. Where as our traditional model has been bring in the long form content, which is the big advantage for us that other don’t do and then break that into scenes. So, now you can combine those scenes with the scenes that are coming from your friends, or sharing with you from yourselves, whatever it is. One of things I did recently is my son turned 18, my wife said “wouldn’t it be cool to have a movie, a DVD, of all his birthdays”. Well I went back, I had some on VHS, some on High 8 – lots of different things, we can take it and adjust those, convert them from analog to digital, post them online or we also have a model, where we will send it back to a user on a hard drive, so they can hookup to their computer and then they can manipulate it themselves locally, which is much faster again, back to bandwidth issues and speed. And put that whole thing together, put the different scenes together.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, I got a DV Camera, I have got hours and hours and hours of DV footage, how do I get my content from my DV camera into your service?

Steve Smallman: Well there is two ways. The easiest way, the fastest way is hook it up through firewire, our stash box software will ingest that, will trans-code it into Windows Media and then do with it what you will. The second method is to send it to us and this for some people is even easier, they don’t know what firewire is, they don’t know anything about that, we will actually put in online for them and then with the very simple editing tool they can do, do what they want with it.