Cloud storage startup StreamNation pivots and shutters Shutter, will give it another try with 'Project Noah'

Deezer co-founder Jonathan Benassaya today announced that his new company is to discontinue StreamNation, a cloud storage solution that allowed users to turn their devices into media centers with online access to photos, videos, movies, TV shows and music.

The service will be shut down permanently on 8 March, along with mobile app Shutter, which provided users with unlimited storage for all of their mobile photos and videos. Another side project, called Picturelife, will live on.

Benassaya writes that the company is, however, not shutting down completely.

In fact, the 'next chapter' is a new service code-named Project Noah, which will see the startup relaunch with a "completely different product using a different platform, a different business model and a different brand".

What killed StreamNation? The fact that it still takes a ton of time to upload a lot of (and/or heavy) files.

Writes Benassaya:

"Thanks to you, we’ve been growing at a steady pace but very early into this venture, we encountered a roadblock. While uploading documents is pretty fast through a normal internet connection, uploading heavy files takes a lot of time. We tested different solutions to try and overcome this.

For a while, we would ship some of our users a hard drive, but we found hard disk drives were unable to sustain more than two deliveries. We also tried to have servers in different data centers across the globe, but while we’ve experienced improved performances, it was not enough."

With Project Noah, the startup aims to offer the same type of experience as StreamNation, but "without the hurdle of uploading".

Users can download media still hosted on StreamNation, or migrate photos and videos to Picturelife.

But on 8 March, all StreamNation accounts will be permanently deleted.