Boxee dives into personal video sharing with Cloudee

Cloudee enters the competitive arena of personal video sharing with Socialcam, Viddy, Dropbox

Boxee, best known for viewing online video content on TV, is launching a new service called Cloudee. Currently in invite-only beta, Cloudee will let its users share personal videos with their friends and family also using the Boxee service.

Initially available as an iPhone app and a Boxee app, Cloudee allows users to capture or upload videos and connects via Facebook for sharing purposes. 

This new extension on Boxee's services came from the common issue that some people want to share videos with a select group of friends and Facebook or Twitter was sending the information out to too many people.

This is a great expansion on the offerings of Boxee, but there is no lack of video-sharing services out there today. Fast-growing Viddy and Socialcam also allows people to share their videos with friends and add filters, while Dropbox allows one-on-one file sharing and is often used for videos. It will be interesting to see if this addition is just another great add-on for Boxee users or if the company is expanding its services to draw in more customers. 

Just last month, Viddy announced that it raised a $30 million from institutional investors to continue its expansion efforts in the competitive field of mobile video applications.

Buzz started a few weeks before the announcement when reports were leaking that Viddy was shopping for $30 million in VC and a valuation in the $300 million ballpark.

Viddy has been going head-to-head with another popular mobile app SocialCam to try and gain the greatest audience of users and stand out as the Instagram of video.

Viddy allows users to share 15-second vignettes shot with their iPhones unlike Socialcam which does not limit the length of its videos.

Participants in Viddy's latest funding round  include NEA, Khosla Ventures, Goldman Sachs and Battery Ventures. 

Socialcam, a Y Combinator graduate,  has signed on dozens of angel investors but has yet to raise a round of venture capital funding, while Viddy is going strong with $37.5 million now that it has completed its Series B round.

Viddy now claims to have more than 27 million registered users and is adding roughly 500,000 users a day.

The app video service has already gotten the celeb bump from users/investors like Shakira,  Jay-Z,  and Will Smith -- which only helps a company targeting a young demographic. 

Viddy has attributed much of its recent sizable growth on the integration with the new Facebook Timeline and user-generated content and sign-ups have shot up dramatically since the Instagram announcement -- but that doesn't mean this company will be the next Instagram. Many look at YouTube and notice that the real money in that service is the advertisements and the new-focus on professional content being created for channels on the site and then they wonder how profitable a user-generated video site can be.

Just a few weeks ago, Viddy reported that it was experiencing 5.5 million downloads in an 11 day period -- and thats just on the iPhone since it has taken a very Instagram path of a single app focus. 

So while it seems like Viddy is on a rocket-ship ride at the moment many are still wondering what will happen once Instagram launches its video product to its rapidly growing 40 million users.

It will be interesting to see if there will be one clear winner in this race to be the big name in video apps or if this market can handle some diversity and several key players. I'm also curious if SocialCam or Viddy are interested in following Instagram's path and look for a big aqui-hire like Twitter, Google or Facebook, or if these companies want to stay independent. 

Boxee explained in its blog this morning that this new service is free but a paid version will be released later with unlimited video storage in the cloud, which users will be able to access from your Boxee Box and any browser.

The company also states that "this is only the first step into the cloud for Boxee. We believe more of our video watching will shift towards on demand and secondary screens, which will mean more video coming from the cloud. Cloudee will become an integral part of the Boxee offering and we are very excited about its future."

Since this is just the beta release, Cloudee currently requires a Facebook account and an invite. Those interested in getting in line for this service can sign up here.