Related Articles
Remember when you used to let friends and family borrow a DVD? Streamnation would really like you to start doing that again, but with your digital media.
What started off as just a way to store, stream, and share your own original photos and videos is now also a way to view and lend your movie and TV show collections to friends and family as well as borrow from theirs.
It works like this: Sign up for an account and upload your DRM-free movies and TV shows to your account on Streamnation (there’s support for 27 video and 23 photo file types). Once in your account, content can then be streamed to iOS devices, any Web browser, or thrown to a TV using Apple AirPlay or Google Chromecast.
The service uses HLS for adaptive streaming of content, so regardless of your data speeds, video should stream smoothly because it switches resolutions on the fly. For those times when you won’t have Web access, you can download your content to iOS devices for offline viewing. (An Android app is currently in development.)
You can also open up your collection for sharing with others so they can stream to their devices. Shared content can only be borrowed by one person at a time, for a 24-hour period, and cannot be downloaded. Likewise, you can dip into their movies and TV shows with the same restrictions.
Streamnation
Of course, to get the most from the service, you’ll have to convince your family and friends (or perhaps make new ones) to sign up and use Streamnation. There is a free account with 2GB of storage, which really won’t get you too far, but you can get it bumped up to 10GB by referring people to the service, downloading Streamnation’s iOS app and desktop software, and promoting it on Twitter and Facebook.
If you want more storage than that (or don’t feel like jumping through hoops to get up to 10GB), paid accounts start at $4 a month for 100GB, and go up to $20 per month for unlimited storage.
All of your content is stored on Streamnation’s private cloud and on Amazon cloud storage, and all files can be retrieved and downloaded at any time, in their original format or at reduced sizes.
Streamnation says movies and TV shows are just the beginning, too. The goal is to become a complete streaming digital media hub, and it has plans to add support for music and book collections.
