Product Review | Kinkast Mobile Video Sharing
Disclosure: I’m an advisor to KinKast.
It seems of late that mobile video is going (or has gone) mainstream. Distribution of smart phones, higher quality video cameras embedded in those phones and the social phenomena of sharing appears to have hit an inflection point or has reached critical mass. In the wake of this, a plethora of video sharing apps have hit the scene: Viddy, Vlix, Socialcam and KinKast.
Most of the recent video apps seem to be imitating the success that Instagram has had with still pictures – allowing people to share their videos broadly with others (friends and strangers alike).
A Different Target
KinKast has been out since 2010 and steadily gaining traction with people who want to maintain control around what video they shoot should be broadly shared or more privately shared. It seems ideal for parents who want to take videos of their kids and share with immediate friends and family without having to contend with privacy settings on YouTube or Facebook. (Learn more about KinKast and it’s Founder Raul Mujica in “KinKast | 5 Questions for Raul Mujica”).
The app is simple at its core. A free download from the Apple App Store and you’ve got the ability to shoot video (just as you would directly via the iPhone video app). A couple of nice features of the video shooting include a “thumb friendly” record button and the ability to shoot in landscape mode (so you are not limited to “skinny” video).
You can also import your previously shot video from your iPhone albums.
After shooting a video you have the ability to view, delete or share immediately. The share function also allows you to “string” together more than one video to share at a time. Sharing via email or Facebook is available. The email sharing draws from the iPhone address book. The service actually uploads your video to a central server in the background via wifi. Once this upload is done, your friends will automatically receive an email notifying them of the shared video. I like being able to share securely and initiate the share immediately. Because videos are stored in the cloud, I have back-ups available and can access them via my computer for viewing.
In the video playlist screen, the clips are sorted by day, month and year and location (which is awesome).
Why I Like It
KinKast offers a hassle-free way to upload videos online. My wife loves taking almost daily videos of my youngest (at the park, violin lesson, learning to ice skate, etc.) and sharing them with his grandparents (one who lives in the East Bay and the others who live in Canada). The app has an upload notifier (on the icon of the app) that lets you know when uploading has completed. Another benefit of using KinKast is the way it uploads videos — clips are send out in chunks, ensuring the upload won’t break if a wifi connection is lost.
Account options: KinKast also backs up the videos for 30 days with a free account. For $4.99 a month (or $49.99 a year), files will be kept saved on KinKast’s servers.
Have you tried KinKast or one of the other mobile video sharing apps? Which do you like best? Why?