Green Cathedral plc

FamilyCam gives its users instant broadband access to their entire home movies collections, enabling them to organise it all and to know that it's all stored safely and securely ready to browse, watch and share at exceptional quality whenever they want.

With FamilyCam, users can store very large quantities of full length home camcorder movies and legacy cine films. Part of the model is to provide a professional media digitisation service to help users import their existing family movie collections from tape, cine and DVD media formats.

FamilyCam also provides its own free movie maker and uploading software to enable all its users to upload videos in almost any digital format to their FamilyCam collections, including movies shot on mobile phones and pocket digital cameras. Many people who buy hard-drive camcorders or who capture video on other digital devices have difficulty dealing with the cascade of video clips they create on such cameras. The FamilyCam upload software solves this problem because it lets people stitch together multiple video files to create perfect movies and then upload them.

FamilyCam has been in stealth development within Green Cathedral since 2006 and draws together all the expertise gained and innovations made since the company's decision in 2005 to shift its focus towards online video technologies.

One of the pivotal innovations incorporated into FamilyCam is a suite of scene tagging tools to enable users to write short descriptive tags about different scenes in their movies. Users and their invited guests can then run searches for scenes they've tagged so they can jump to those scenes instantly and enjoy them. The Familycam scene tagging and search technology was developed and patented by Green Cathedral's video search spin-off, Doovle Limited.

Another innovation unique to FamilyCam is its emphasis on giving all its users their own personal Internet home video channel. The Familycam website at www.familycam.com is where users sign up and manage their accounts and movies, but to watch the movies themselves, users open up their own personal video channel which is designed to display perfectly on PCs, Macs and HDTV screens. The FamilyCam video channel technology was developed by Green Cathedral's Internet TV channel spin-off, Cambridge IPTV Limited.

Dr Michael Woodley, FamilyCam technical founder and CEO commented: "The days are gone when the excitement of watching cine reels with a projector in the living room was sufficient reward to justify the effort. Today, people shoot family video so easily that the comparative effort of later finding the right scene on the right tape or disc and watching it seems to be too much. Everyone in the family can shoot it but the magic of presenting it has somehow been lost.
 
"With FamilyCam, we can change that and we want to rekindle the excitement of the magic lantern show in the living room.  Having a FamilyCam channel is meant to be a life-long project and one that members will pass on to their heirs, so that eventually generations are spanned.
 
"When several members of a family each have their own FamilyCam channel, this opens a new dimension of multiple home video collections all linked together in a family tree. One generation starts the process and subsequent generations inherit and add to what was started. YouTube is where you put funny clips of your skateboarding cat. FamilyCam is a place where you can build an accessible archive of your precious and private family memories."

The FamilyCam service has been undergoing private trials with 50 families whose enthusiasm and feedback has helped refine the product to make it even more compelling and simple to use. Now, FamilyCam is open to the public and any UK resident can sign up free of charge and start using the service. Not surprisingly, the company has produced a set of online videos to introduce the service to new users and to help all users get to grips with some of the more advanced features such as guest sharing, scene tagging and video scene browsing.

All users are given one hour of high-quality video storage for free and can then upgrade to a range of subscription packages giving from 10 to 100 hours. All video streaming for users and their invited guests is free and guests can login from anywhere in the world.

Business Focus
Green Cathedral's plan for FamilyCam Limited is to grow its online subscription business and its offline media conversion business independently in the UK to begin with, followed by launches in other countries. The company is already in discussions with camcorder manufacturers and major retailers with a view to providing FamilyCam accounts with new camcorder purchases, especially hard-drive and solid-state drive cameras which record straight to digital formats.

Technology Focus
FamilyCam uses the latest Adobe Flash H264 video streaming standards and claims to have one of the finest Flash video players in the world, providing an amazing and identical experience on Windows PCs and Apple Macs. Dr Woodley commented: "We spent a long time trying other video standards such as Quicktime, FLV and Windows Media. But Quicktime has no full-screen streaming capability, FLV streams well but is difficult to work with and WMV is a closed and inferior format that just doesn't stream on Macs, even using the rather buggy Microsoft Silverlight plugins. When Adobe announced H264/MP4 support for its Flash media streaming server, we found our answer."

About Green Cathedral plc
Green Cathedral plc is a privately held technology incubator based in Cambridge. The company was founded in 1996 by two Londoners, Dr Michael Woodley (ex Autonomy) and Paul Putwain (oil and fashion industries), who first met in a Cambridge pub. Green Cathedral was started with a £30,000 bank loan and posted group revenues of £7m for FY2007.

Having sold its main operating subsidiary, GCDM Limited, a successful web solutions and digital marketing business in a cash deal in 2007, Green Cathedral plc is now focused on the development of Internet TV and video soundtrack search technologies through its subsidiaries, Cambridge IPTV and Doovle Limited, as well as its newest incubation, FamilyCam.

About FamilyCam Limited
FamilyCam began life in 2006 as a project within Green Cathedral. FamilyCam Limited was incorporated in 2007 with a founding team including Chairman, Mark Bernstein (ex Geocities, Gameplay and AOL) and Operations Director, Giles Hutchison (ex Reciva).

For more on Green Cathedral plc, see http://www.greencathedral.plc.uk
For more on FamilyCam, see http://www.familycam.com
For more on Doovle, see http://www.doovle.com