In the ever increasingly complex world of company buyouts, Snapfish announced on Monday their purchase of Motionbox, a video platform for families and friends to share their memories online. To make things even more complex, this actually comes shortly after Motionb0x acquired the highly successful personal video blogging service Viddyou in October. While this may seem like a bold move for Snapfish, which deals mostly in printing and sharing photographs, it is upon closer inspection, a natural evolution for the company (which was bought out by computer giant HP in 2005). What Snapfish has realized is that even though photos are important ways to store and share memories, it’s no secret that with the dwindling cost of high end cameras and a veritable bevy of software to edit them with, that people have begun to turn to video as their main way of sharing memories with loved ones. At the same time, not everyone wants that video to be seen by thousands of complete strangers on sites like YouTube and Facebook, which is one of the biggest reasons for Motionbox’s existence. This same idea also held a lot of promise as an upgrade to Snapfish’s service, so HP naturally decided to join the fray by buying the already developed technology of Motionbox.
As for the site itself, HP says the “current Motionbox site” will remain open until August 10, after which the service will be moved over to Snapfish.com. Unfortunately this means that for users of Motionbox, their videos will need to be downloaded from the site before it moves over to Snapfish. Thankfully, for this trouble, Snapfish is giving Motionbox Premium members a free year of Snapfish’s video service.