We honor our free DVD offer for any customer who signed up when it was
in force, which is typically a customer who signed up prior to Jan 1,
2008.

Has this been done away for annual subscribers with the introduction of archive DVDs?

I am trying to convince a good friend of mine to migrate from Flickr to Phanfare before the unlimited storage is phased out. Does the migration tool preserve albums and captions?

And, I want to say a big ups to the company for taking care of us “lifetime” subscribers. We rolled the dice with you back in the day and I am glad to see that you recognize our value to the company.

And just think, I agonized for weeks whether to cough up the money for a lifetime account. Can't wait for the rollout!

Customers who sign up before august 1 (or whenever we actually roll
out the release that introduces pro) get unlimited storage going
forward.

The 49.99 price should be stable for a while. We just lowered it
anticipating that new limited storage accounts. In a way buying right
now is a bit of an arbitrage.

You won't need to go pro in august. That is entirely optional.

Once we introduce storage limits for new customers we will be in a
position to also do features that eat storage for dinner: raw files
and longer HD video.

We will likely add these just to pro and probably won't worry about
our unlimited storage customers who buy pro and can access those
storage hungry features without limit.

Tapping this from my iPhone from the beach (Gotta love the disqus
email to comment gateway)

I just discovered Phanfare from a newsletter item from image-resource.com. I have been playing with the 14-day trial, and like what I see so far (it sure isn't flickr ! And anybody who holds USAA up as a business model gets serious kudos in my book – they are a true model of how a company should be run.

Now I am not sure what I should do/exactly what the options are for the future, with the changes that I see are coming soon. I am not sure I understand how this will work.

If I sign up for the $50 plan now (7/4), do I get unlimited lifetime storage @ $50/year in the future? I am not a pro photographer, but my wife and I have a lot of GBs that would be nice to have in offsite (not at home) archives (I did read your blog about that – good stuff).

Does this deal change when the Pro accounts come out? I am not so concerned about CNAME (don't even know what that is), removal of Phanfare name from the banner, etc. I guess the question that is not clear to me is: how do my features/costs change from what I have now when the new 'system' comes on line soon. Do I have to upgrade to Pro? Am I 'grandfathered' in?

I appreciate your time and willingness to provide guideance.

Just out of curiosity, how many lifetime customers are in existence today?

Thank you for taking care of us!

We take video in a variety of formats and resolutions. Generally, we re-encode any video over 4 megabits/second, and it is difficult to get a 1280p video to look a that bit rate. no problem making a 720p video look good at that bit rate.

I don't know the technical details of why AVCHD is not well supported, but it never has been. note that you can re-encode the video (hassle to be sure) and upload it and it works.

By the way, I have all your stuff running on Win 7 RC1, release 7100 and everything is stable.

I will announce the pricing when we are about two weeks out, once we know exactly which features we are going to get done for the release.

Is it safe to assume that the “Pro” plan (with the features I'm interested in) will be more than the current $50 for the premium?

I appreciate your open honest feedback, and will wait eagerly for more announcements here on your blog.

Bandwidth is nearly never an issue. We only turn off users who are hosting pirated video to thousands of people. Those people can use youtube

We are not a huge company. I dabble in customer support. I maintain the blog. The forums everyone in the company reads. Our support wizards use a ticket system and are more responsible in making sure every issue gets resolved and every question answered. Depending on whether I am traveling or taking a deep dive on some other issue, I am not always responsive. But when we roll out new stuff, communicating changes and engaging customers is my #1 priority.

Hope to have you as a customer.

BTW, I want to give a shout out to http://www.disqus.com. This new comment system makes it possible for me respond to comments using email, which is awesome.

Now, I won't even pretend to know anything about your business model or how it all works, but here's what I'm hoping for:

10-20GB storage (think you said about $4/GB)
???GB bandwidth (not sure how much is used now)
Optional Banner removal
CNAME support (love using my own domain name)
Continued PC Application usage
Layout adjustments
CSS tweaking (custom colors, fonts, etc)

for about the $50 current price point. Again, I have no idea of that's a sustainable system/business model or not, but I can dream, right?

I'm not sure what features that might leave for Pro; I know you've got some goodies brewing. I'd suspect the bigger/longer videos, more storage, selling photos, and maybe premium support (although the couple of times I've asked questions, it was very impressive already)

I'm excited to see what the future holds….

And lastly, I'm impressed/shocked that a CEO is actually taking the time to talk with (potential) customers directly. A class-act that I think should happen more often in the rest of the world.

Just to be clear, our plans are to introduce pro this summer. At that point, new premium and pro accounts will have storage limits. New premium accts will have a hard limit. New pro accounts will have a greater limit, and the option of adding additional storage. So a customer who needs more than the premium amount of storage will need to upgrade to pro, which will give them much more storage.

Based on current usage, 90% of our customers would fit into the expected storage limit of the pro accounts. The additional storage charges will therefore be invisible to just about everyone but very heavy storage users.

With a rational plan in place to charge people for storage, we will be able to do features that today we have been reluctant to do because of the storage cost: longer videos, 1280p video (we do 720p today) and raw files.

Which uploading process are you using?