Apps Closing Down
The excellent Katch, which was designed to allow you to "catch" your Periscope and/or Meerkat live stream videos so they could be watched later than the 24-hour limit, will be closing shop on Wednesday, May 4th. Although I was still new to using Katch to save my Periscope videos, I was really looking forward to creating a nice backlog of some excellent experiences. I do have a couple of videos uploaded there so I'll have to do something about them soon! And what about the video we took from #UCET16, what will happen to those? We'll pull them off and save them another way.
If you go to the Katch.me homepage you are greeted with the announcement as well as a link to the Medium article they wrote explaining the reason for the shutdown. There is also a timeline of when you need to take care of your videos currently stored on their site. The team has created two options for you to either export your videos to YouTube or just download them to your hard drive.
Either option just makes me more and more sad, especially since we used Periscope at #UCET16 and then used Katch to save the video. We will probably just pull them off and then upload them to our UCET YouTube channel instead, so don't worry too much about those videos being lost. But on a personal note, I'm saddened because the #PassTheScopeEDU event I participated in last week, and hope to continue with into the future, was based on using Periscope and then Katch to save the video. I'll be working with those folks to find some other way to save those videos now.
So why is Katch shutting down? According to their Medium Post:
We always saw Katch as a Hulu for live streaming. But if we were going to get there, we would need more resources (money, people, servers, time) that would enable us to move quickly to adapt to the increasingly competitive landscape and to mature the features for a wider group of users. We simply haven’t been able to secure the capital to do that.
And if losing Katch wasn't enough, I will also be losing the excellent Copy sync tool on Sunday, May 1st! I've known about the ending of Copy for a while longer than that of Katch, but I think Copy closing is hitting me harder because I have been using it for longer. Copy was a great syncing tool similar to Dropbox except that it offered more initial space for free. For example, I had 25 GB for free simply because I followed their onboarding tips. Such a waste!
According to the Copy.com homepage, the reason for the shutdown has to do with the need to reallocate resources to other areas of the company.
Copy and CudaDrive have provided easy-to-use cloud file services and sharing functionality to millions of users the past 4+ years. However, as our business focus has shifted, we had to make the difficult decision to discontinue the Copy and CudaDrive services and allocate those resources elsewhere.
If you have been to any of my training sessions at UCET, SUECON, or URSA, you will know that I have been a proponent of using Copy for a while and now I will have to look elsewhere for recommendations. While I do you Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive, I liked that I had another great service that offered a free-tier to recommend to educators. I guess it's back to the drawing board for what other tools can I use.
I guess the moral of the story here is that if you love a service or tool then you need to find a way to send them money to help support the developers or else this is a possible fate. That's why I try to pay for services I find absolutely imperative to my workflow. Would I have paid for both Katch and Copy if given the chance? Possibly, but I guess I'll never know now.
This post was edited from a post that originally appeared on EdTechBabble.net.
