14 DAY TRIAL // The cloud business is blooming at a faster rate than ever before. While there are some powerful players out there already, including Google, Amazon and Dropbox, there’s always room for more services, including for Streem.
Streem Drive is a brand new product that is being released today by a San Francisco-based startup co-founded by a Thiel Fellow.
Unlike many other similar cloud storage services, however, Streem Drive offers something more – unlimited space. Of course, this comes for a price, but considering what the others are charging, the $20 per month seem like pocket change.
The company is able to make such a package after it developed several important algorithms. For instance, it doesn’t allow the same file to be stored twice on the same account, which will save a lot of space. Streem also has a built-in compression algorithm and another one that estimates how much the average user will store.
Streem Drive doesn’t work by syncing a folder on your computer with the cloud, which means that you don’t have to continue storing the original file on drive for a second longer after uploading it to the cloud. Instead, the service stores a single copy in the cloud and streams the file down whenever it is accessed.
In fact, you can immediately check out your file in the cloud, even if it’s a video. The streaming technology that Streem comes with can set the quality of the video based on the user’s available bandwidth. Thanks to the fact that the videos are transcoded on the fly, there’s no waiting times, so users won’t have to worry about formats, codecs, resolution or even file size.
The company will be offering unlimited storage for free for everyone that shares their unique link during the beta period after signing up. After that, an additional month of free unlimited storage space will be offered.
Then, you can either choose to pay $20 per month for the unlimited storage or switch to the free plan, which offers 20GB of storage.
Another awesome thing about Streem is the fact that it is cross platform. It can be accessed via its dedicated apps for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, or the web. Soon, the service will also come with Chromecast and Roku support, while integration for other devices is also on the way.
“The amount of media people are accumulating is exploding, and we want to make sure consumers don't have to think about running out of space for their videos, photos, and other cherished memories. We want everything to be seamless -- from our native software integration to the unlimited cloud storage, so you don't have to change your behavior to use Streem,” said Ritik Malhotra, co-founder and CEO of Streem, as well as 2012 Thiel Fellow.
For comparison, for $20, Dropbox offers 200GB of space, while Google offers 1TB of space for $10.