Streamnation Nails Media Storage, Hooks Into Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox and More
The last we wrote about Streamnation the company had just launched its digital locker product to the world. At the time Streamnation allowed you to upload your media to the company’s servers and then stream that media from any device, regardless of platform. That includes mobile devices, and even the ability to do so offline. While that wasn’t too huge a deal on its own, Streamnation also lets you invite your friends in as well. If your buddies sign up for accounts, you can give them “lending” access, essentially letting you share whatever movies or TV shows you’ve uploaded willy-nilly.
Today, all of that is still the case, but the company is also introducing a number of new features and design tweaks to improve the user experience. The first major feature addition is the ability to import (with extreme ease) content from all different services, including (but certainly not limited to) Facebook, Instagram, Google Drive, and Dropbox. In our tests, with a few clicks of the mouse we were importing all of our photos and videos on Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr directly into our Streamnation account. It really couldn’t be easier.
Part of the reason I’m digging Streamnation even more now is this type of integration with other services, it truly turns the service into a hub for all your media content. Of course, you can also directly upload TV shows, movies, and photos directly from your computer via the website or by downloading their native desktop uploader application (Windows and OS X). The desktop app can even be set to monitor specific folders for when new content is added to them and then automatically upload the newly added content to Streamnation — keep everything up-to-date. The company also offers an iOS and Android app.
As I mentioned before, Streamnation is also rolling out some design changes today as well. The new user interface is sleek and easier to navigate, and frankly, just looks a lot better. I also really like the new “timeline” view of all your photos and videos, making it easier to keep track of everything.
Then there are the little things which Streamnation just does really well. For example, I’m a huge fan of album art for my music — I literally cringe when I run across a song in my iTunes library without proper album artwork. Streamnation has developed a super awesome way to identify uploaded video content such as TV shows or movies and determine what the appropriate artwork should be, it then will prompt you if you want to assign the artwork to the file(s) and once you do it just looks gorgeous–like a real media library.
Perhaps what’s even greater is that they didn’t stop there. If you were to click into one of your TV shows, Streamnation inserts a background photo, thumbnail previews of the content, and even a show description at the bottom and who stars in the show. I love it. It does the same thing for movies too!
If all this seems great, then you will love the pricing. New users get up to 20GB of storage free. Then you can pay for additional storage, starting at $4 a month for 100GB and going up to $19 a month for unlimited storage. Lastly, it’s worth noting that you cannot upload DRM protected content to Streamnation, so if you buy a movie or TV show from iTunes it will not be able to be uploaded.