Two brothers and a lot of home movies.

It started with some drawings

Doug has been known to show up with an outdated camcorder, mostly because it's awesome. Part hipster alternative, part a genuine urge to capture a moment the way it actually was.

Some time ago he came to Drew with a few mock-up drawings and an idea. Phones are incredible cameras, and they leave you with hundreds of little clips that have nothing to do with each other, spread across phones, albums, hard drives and clouds. A camcorder did something different without anyone asking it to. You filmed a bit, stopped, filmed something else a few days later, and after a while you had a tape: one continuous thing, in order, covering a stretch of your life.

Doug wanted that shape back, on the phones everyone already carries. He showed Drew the drawings and said, "It's called VideoBro!"

Drew remembers thinking: I think I can build that.

The shelf of tapes

We were lucky. Our dad was a camcorder dad. The full version, including the voice: the narrating voice that only ever came from behind a camera. If you grew up with one of those, you can hear it right now.

There was a shelf of home movies in the house, and we used to dig through it.

We still reference quotes from those tapes. They're priceless to us. A big part of our childhood is still there to watch because our dad bothered to point a camera at ordinary days. That shelf is most of the reason VideoBro exists. If you want the wider history of those machines, we wrote it up as the golden age of the family camcorder.

What watching it back did

We set out to fix a video problem. Then we started using VideoBro on our own lives, and it did something we hadn't planned for.

Most of the technology in a normal day points you outward, at everybody else. This little piece of it kept pointing us back at our own lives. When we watched our own tapes back, the ordinary stuff held up. Mostly what we noticed was how lucky we are: the friends, the family, the dumb jokes, the days that didn't seem like anything while they were happening.

None of it is for strangers. The good part is filming it, keeping it, and watching it with the people who were there. Our own lives turned out to be worth paying attention to.

Doug and Drew, these days

Doug is a director in TV animation. Drew is a sound design manager in the video game industry. We've both always made things. Drew leans toward music and sound and dabbles in visual art; Doug leans toward fine art and visual storytelling and dabbles in music. The skills overlap without really competing, which is about as good an arrangement as two brothers can hope for.

There are no titles at VideoBro. We both design it, build it and use it, and the camcorder still goes wherever Doug goes.

Writing about VideoBro? The press page has a fact sheet, logos and screenshots, along with our launch announcement and our news on VHS mode and the Tape Den and on Shared Albums and film sharing.

Your shelf

If you have your own version of that shelf, or a phone full of clips you keep meaning to do something with, that's who we made it for. How it works walks through the whole thing with the real button names.

Why a tape beats a camera roll is a longer argument, and it has its own page. Read the VideoBro story →