A smartphone app known as Odysee hit the market last week, providing a new solution for backing up your smartphone pictures and videos. Instead of backing up media with iCloud, which can be both pricey and sometimes insecure, Odysee backs up the content to your home computer.
The startup was founded by Raghavan Menon and Shiva Javalagi. When Menon became a father, he noticed his phone was suddenly flooded with special pictures and precious memories.
“After they were born a few years ago, I found that walking around with a smartphone meant 100x more videos and photos captured,” Menon told TechCrunch. “I rarely saw the videos that my wife took unless she grabbed me and showed them to me on her phone. That’s how we started: solve the video archiving, access, and distribution problem for me—and photos would be handled as a subset.”
With Odysee, your photos and videos are automatically synced to your computer. The app can support up to five devices on a single computer, so the whole family can access each other’s pictures from the home computer. This not only allows the app to be a backup solution but also creates a social network for the household that works without any time-consuming uploads to the web.
The app is currently free to download and use. In 2015, it will cost $5 per year, but that is still significantly lower than the cost of iCloud.
“Our vision is to be a thin layer in the cloud that ties together all of your storage devices, capture devices and viewer devices,” said Menon. “We are storage agnostic.”