What is Bitcasa?
Bitcasa is a start-up begun by former execs at Mastercard, VeriSign and Mozy and is the latest entrant to the cloud storage market.
What makes Bitcasa different is that the service offers you truly infinite storage, all for just $10 per month. In fact, when you add your first folder, you are told that you have over 500TB of remaining free space, and the start-up says that number is only there because Windows and Mac machines cannot display higher numbers.
How does Bitcasa offer unlimited storage?
The company’s CEO says it can offer unlimited storage, “because 60 percent of their data is identical.” Simply, when you “cloudify” a music track or movie, the chances are someone else has the same exact track or movie on their computer.
Bitcasa uses “patented de-duplication algorithms, compression techniques, and encryption” to identify duplicate files and therefore the company only keeps a couple, (or even one) of of the files in its servers. By doing so, the company can keep its costs significantly down and offer infinite storage to its users.
Is it safe?
Now that you understand how it works, the biggest question is whether the data is safe, and who (if anyone) can access it. Bitcasa says every upload is encrypted and protected on the server side, meaning no one but you can ever access it, including employees of the company or “snooping” media companies.
This is great for users who may be scared that anyone can search their personal files. Services like DropBox have admitted that employees are prohibited from accessing files, but are not blocked in any way. They may lose their jobs, but they could do so after they have taken all your pictures, for example.
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Result for: compression technique
The new startup company FilmOn has claimed that they will offer HD video streaming with little to no buffering time using a new compression technique they call HDi.
Using HDi, the company says the footprint of HD videos can be reduced to 2Mbps. The service did not explain how that type of compression is accomplished.
Many of the movies available on the site are free as well and costs are offset by private financing and the use of Amazon Web Services for hosting.
Alki David, the company’s founder, notes the service will work in the US and the UK and that “premium” movies are available, mainly new releases, for $6 to stream and $8 to buy.
