Back in August we wrote about Concord, MA-based EnjoyMyMedia, which was beta-testing a system it’s positioning as everyman’s media-sharing technology. The company describes itself as a mini-TV network; at its site, you can download a program that lets you turn any folder on your computer into a “transmitter” that will “broadcast” any file you put there to friends or family who subscribe to your private “channel.”
This week the company officially launched the service, and added a few features that weren’t there in August—including the ability to watch Flash versions of large video files while the original MP4 or MPEG files download, the ability to track files as subscribers forward them to others, and the ability to scan print items and transmit them with a single click.
EnjoyMyMedia CEO Keith Loris calls this latter feature “a small technical thing,” but says it’s illustrative of the company’s philosophy. “We do not view our mission as file-sharing; we’re trying to help you share your personal life, and a lot of people’s personal lives are not digital,” Loris says. “If you have a desktop scanner, this lets you scan a piece of paper right into your channel, whether it’s the portrait of Grandma on the wall or the picture your kid drew at preschool.”
The Flash feature is another seemingly small but useful enhancement to the service. If you’re trying to share an hour-long video of your daughter’s ballet recital, Loris points out, you don’t want to make viewers wait while their computers download a 1-gigabyte file. EnjoyMyMedia transcodes MP4, MPEG, and other video formats into Flash. The file then starts playing in a subscriber’s browser immediately, regardless of the size of the original file, which continues to download in the background. “It makes long videos really usable for casual Internet users for the first time,” Loris says.
