As someone who has been filmed for my husband's family videos for years without ever seeing the final result, I have been leery about purchasing my own camcorder. I imagine that somewhere we would keep a pile of tapes or DVDs--or just have them floating on our hard drives for years--and never look at them again. But now that we're about to become parents my husband dragged me into the age of moving pictures with a Mini DVD camcorder. So far, we've recorded our dog as a test run and I watched that. Then we recorded our baby shower a few weeks ago and I have never seen it.

So I was interested in Fliqz.com, a new video sharing and storage site that takes the concept of Shutterfly or other photo sharing sites and brings it to video. The idea is simple. You register, upload your video and then share it either by e-mailing friends and family or embedding some code within your blog or e-mail that will launch the video. It seems pretty simple, but because I have no videos that fit within the 100 MB file upload limit, I couldn't upload anything to find out. The company says that's enough to play 15 minutes of high-resolution digital video, but since my videos so far are shot to look good on our high-definition television, they're way too large. The company will also set up an FTP transfer for larger videos if you ask them to.

What I can say is that receiving the video and watching it is very simple and the navigation for finding the videos is nice. Instead of scrolling through hundreds of pages of video, videos are grouped by the person in your network that posted them, then by labels chosen by that person, such as family, friends and artistic videos. It makes navigation pretty easy. The site accepts most movie file formats and offers the ability to put up as many videos as you want. For more details see the company's help site.

The site makes its money selling advertising and hosting video for other sites like Roadtrip America. Benjamin Wayne, president of Fliqz, says because streaming video to family and friends requires less infrastructure compared with a one-to-many model like YouTube, the site doesn't need a lot of capital. The hosting is outsourced to SAVVIS Inc. and Fliqz has raised about $1 million from angel investors such as The Caufield Angel Fund, David Witherow, founder of VentureOne, Don Hutchison, a former senior vice president at Excite@home and Marty Korman, head of the M&A practice at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati PC. — Stacey Higginbotham