College football season has started, and once again Sports Illustrated has launched a Gotuit-powered video portal to track the leading Heisman candidates. Viewers to the 2008 Heisman FilmRoom sponsored by Nissan can watch by Top Contenders, Players, Position, or School. There is a 2008 preview video for each player live now, and each week SI will publish highlights for each player and update all the playlists including new rankings for the Top Contenders. Once choosing a player, Gotuit metadata allows the viewer to jump to a specific scene, like Touchdowns, Sacks, or Statistics, as well as link to or embed their favorite highlight.
Our pick is Florida’s QB Tim Tebow. Check out his 2008 preview:
If you missed us at Building Blocks last week, get over to the inaugural Akamai Global Customer Conference next week in Boston.The show is being held at The Boston Renaissance Waterfront Hotel, from August 18-20.
We will be set up in the Partner Pavilion where you can see demonstrations of our very latest technology, including our recent integration with Move Networks, plus our President & CEO Mark Pascarella will also be speaking on a panel.
The panel is: “The Syndicated Video Economy—Reality or Hype?” on Tuesday, August 19th @ 2pm, and is being moderated by Will Richmond, President & Founder of Broadband Directions and publisher of the VideoNuze broadband video news and analysis service.
Here is the panel description from Akamai:
Executives from leading media and entertainment companies will discuss the best way to package and monetize video assets. Which strategies are most likely to prevail?
Yesterday’s announcement of our completed integration with Move Networks was a major milestone for Gotuit on a few dimensions.
First, it means any video publisher that is currently using Move Networks, or thinking about switching to Move for their premium video quality, now can take advantage of Gotuit’s ability to deliver personalized, non-linear viewing experiences that will serve (more) advertising along the way at precise advertising insertion points.
We have proven our ability to surface a video archive and improve its shelf-life by exposing it in a variety of playlists or navigational paths. This is done without doing any video editing. For example:
Sports content By Team, By Player, Event, Top 10 Plays, Goals, etc.
Comedy or drama content By Character, By Topic, By Plot Line, Best Scene;
Entertainment content By Artist/Performer, By Song, By Event, By Date;
Searching within the video;
Jumping to any scene of interest;
Defining your own scenes and remixes then sharing them with friends.
This flexibility fundamentally changes how publishers using Move can present and monetize their content.(Check out XONtv at www.xontv.tv to see this first hand.)
Second, this adds to the list of video codecs which Gotuit has enabled.Publishers can stream broadband video in Flash, h.264, and now Move Networks and use Gotuit.In fact, XONtv originally went live with Flash last November (as announced here) and was converted to Move.In our past, we have also powered MPEG-2 for cable VOD and 3GPP for mobile applications.This highlights how Gotuit’s rich metadata is independent of video codec or distribution platform.
Third, this announcement is the latest in a series of Gotuit integrations with other companies in the broadband video ecosystem.Our focus is on delivering technology and tools to author scene-level metadata and advertising insertion points.Integrating our video metadata management system with partners such as CDNs (like Akamai), ad providers (like DoubleClick & Advertising.com), and content management systems (like Move Publish) allows publishers with existing video workflows to easily adopt Gotuit.Look for more integrations with other content management systems to be announced soon.(If you are a potential partner and would like to discuss an integration, let us know at partners@gotuit.com.)
Or, if you are a Move Networks customer looking to improve your user experience, session time and/or advertising inventory, drop us a line at sales@gotuit.com.
If you are interested in hearing our perspective on metadata and how it vastly improves a publisher’s ability to monetize their content, you are in luck.
Gotuit’s President & CEO Mark Pascarella will speak at the Digital Hollywood - Building Blocks 2008 conference next week in San Jose, CA. He will be on the panel: “Video Metadata Revolution: Unleashing the Value of Video Programming in an On Demand World” on Thursday, August 7th at 2:15pm.
Here is the panel description from Digital Hollywood:
As “on demand” video programming becomes widely accessible via numerous platforms and players, rich video metadata is being used to enable consumers to personalize their viewing experience, tailored to their interests and viewing environment. As a result, while consumers were once limited to viewing programs from beginning to end, they can now engage in video “snacking”, “playlisting”, “remixing” and “sharing”. At the same time, rich video metadata is offering content producers and distributors new ways to present and organize the program assets, thereby creating new revenue streams with the opportunity for higher CPM, metadata driven, contextual advertising. As technology, content and advertising companies now work together to unleash the power generated by rich video metadata, the consumer will be in the driver’s seat, watching video when they want and how they want.
With the NFL Draft coming up this weekend, it is a great time for you to check out our latest FilmRoom with Sports Illustrated.SI secured video highlights of the top 200 collegiate football players in the country, and then used Gotuit’s patented technology to present those highlights in multiple ways, recognizing that their visitors have different reasons for coming to the site.
For example, if you are interested in SI’s mock draft, choose this path.Or, if you are a huge USC fan and want to easily see just the Trojans in the draft, click here.Maybe your team needs a wide receiver, so you just want to quickly see all the WRs in the draft.Or you just want to see great highlights of your favorite player, such as Chris Long.
Presenting the library with these various paths for the viewer to take results in a more engaging experience and longer session times.Gotuit’s use of metadata allows SI to do this without requiring multiple copies of the videos or any video editing.The source library is unleashed by publishing it with a rich metadata set for the viewers to use to personalize their experience.
SI is also being aggressive about using the embedded player to enhance their editorial coverage with video as you can see in Don Banks’ mock draft article here.
During the draft this weekend, the NFL Draft FilmRoom will be updated to present the actual draft order playlist and playlists for each NFL team so viewers can quickly and easily see who their team came away with.
Too many publishers make the mistake of not optimizing their library by only presenting one path for their viewers to take.SI could have put each video up as a separate clip with a search box, but instead they thought about the various reasons their viewers would have for coming to the site and used Gotuit metadata to offer compelling choices to pull in more viewership.With strong usage distributed across the various paths, this is proving to be a successful strategy.
Answer - we each have products that were selected, along with six other companies, in the 2008 Streaming Media Editor’s Picks. This annual list, recently published in the 2008 Streaming Media Industry Sourcebook and online at streamingmedia.com here , highlights “the top ten products and services in the streaming and online video industries in the last year.”
Here is what Streaming Media editor Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen wrote about our flagship product: “The Gotuit PowerVideo Suite is the only product in our Editor’s Picks list that also took home a Streaming Media Reader’s Choice Award (Oct/Nov pp.30-42). That award was in the Search and Indexing Platform category, but the VideoDiscovery Module is only part of the PowerVideo Suite’s four-pronged attack. Granted that’s a terrific app for both viewers and advertisers - videos in a library are marked with metadata for each logical scene, and then scenes are categorized into playlists based upon that metadata - but the VideoMarker and VideoMixer modules are equally impressive. The former lets users themselves control the marking and tagging of their favorite clips, while the latter allows publishers to give users various degrees of control over the metadata, building far richer search and indexing experiences than would otherwise be possible.”
The full list of 2008 Streaming Media Editor’s Picks is as follows: Accordent Media Management System, Adobe Media Player, Apple iPhone, Elgato Turbo.264, Gotuit PowerVideo Suite, Microsoft Expression Encoder, Mogulus Live Broadcast, Rhozet Carbon Coder, ViewCast Niagara GoStream Plus, and Wowza Media Server Pro.
It is an honor to be acknowledged by such an authority on the industry, and alongside such prominent companies and compelling products. We have been building out our patented video metadata technology for over eight years, and this recognition is a tremendous validation of our unique approach to unleashing video libraries.
Yesterday, we went live with our latest product with Sports Illustrated – the 2008 NCAA Men’s Basketball FilmRoom, sponsored by RadioShack.This is our sixth video product with SI, with more planned for the upcoming months.
Just in time for people filling out their brackets, this SI FilmRoom showcases regular season highlights of the teams in this year’s NCAA college basketball tournament.Gotuit metadata presents multiple views into the video library to let the viewer take the path that is most interesting to them.
For example, fans can use the By Seed view to easily watch just the top seeded teams in the tournament.The By Conference view lets viewers watch a playlist of the teams in a particular conference, such as the Big East, Pac 10, ACC, SEC, or Big 10.The Still Alive playlist will be updated throughout the tournament as the field goes from 65 down to the eventual champion.Finally, there is also a By Team view to use an alphabetical list to access a particular team.
From an advertising perspective, this is an important milestone as it is our first live implementation with DoubleClick for in-stream video advertising, and Quigo for in-page text ads.Look for more details on this in a future post.
Like all our implementations, even though we never edit the original source video into clips, viewers can use the link and embed codes to share specific video scenes or playlists using our metadata to point to the precise sections within the video library.
I am personally more of a pro basketball (Celtics) fan, so I will leave you with this SI FilmRoom video for the Kansas Jayhawks, in honor of Kansas alum and Boston Celtics captain Paul Pierce.
This week, we were extremely proud to announce our entry into the Educational video market with Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario.CarletonUniversity has a long history of using video to augment the students’ learning process, and for the past three years has offered all its courses through its video on demand service.
Starting this semester, Carleton students can take advantage of VideoNotes™, an on-line video portal powered by Gotuit that lets students annotate the classroom lecture video and create remixes that can be used as study guides for particular topics.
Students can mark scenes from the lecture video, give those scenes their own title, description and keywords, and create a remix/mashup with both scenes they defined as well as scenes defined by others.
Students can now effectively search inside the two-hour lecture videos to find the specific topics of interest, and share what they find or create with the community.This is all achieved leveraging metadata, without any video editing or new videos being stored.
Here is a link to one student’s highlights from Lecture 4 of Professor Dan McIntyre’s Introduction to Psychology course, dealing with Motivation: http://videonotes.carleton.ca/?mid=25.
VideoNotes is another great example of using the power of metadata to deliver a personalized viewing experience that optimizes the value of the video library.Allowing the students themselves to define what is relevant further engages them in the learning process and deepens their understanding of the content.
(And to be clear, we also believe they should still go to class and not just watch video.)
Welcome to our first post at Gotuit Unleashed.In this space, we will informally share our views on the best and worst practices to unleashing a video library.Our target audience is anyone in the business of engaging an audience with stored video, across entertainment, education, and enterprise categories.This post will give you a quick summary of Gotuit’s approach towards video metadata.
Gotuit was founded back in 2000 with a simple idea – using rich metadata to describe stored video so that the viewer can take their own, personalized path through the video library.When viewers watch live video, they have no choice but to watch it in the broadcast sequence.However, once the video has been recorded and can be watched on-demand, the viewer should be able to watch it in any order they want.Our founders filed numerous patent applications around this idea of using metadata for the enhanced navigation, discovery, search, and monetization of stored content.Gotuit was founded when those patents issued.
If a library has been indexed using Gotuit, viewers can jump inside any video directly to the scene that is most interesting, or select playlists with scenes across multiple assets.Choose a news video and jump right to the sports section.Watch only scenes of your favorite character in a sitcom.Catch up on a particular storyline in a drama.Review a particular procedure within a training video.The possibilities are endless and cut across all categories of video.
Gotuit has numerous implementations across cable video-on-demand, broadband, and mobile platforms.In each case, viewers sampled more video and had longer session times than before the library was enhanced with Gotuit metadata.
In addition to making the viewing experience far superior, publishers enjoy much more flexible and powerful ways to monetize their content.First, since viewers are watching more video they see more ads along the way.Second, those ads can be more targeted by taking advantage of the rich metadata describing the scenes they are watching.Third, publishers can create brand new products from the original video library simply by using metadata to present different views of the same content.
A crucial advantage of Gotuit’s approach is that the original video library remains in its unedited form.The metadata becomes the lens through which the audience sees the video, so there is no need to cut the video up into clips or edit the video in any way.
In the past 18-24 months many publishers focused simply on getting their video online.With that done, many are now taking the next steps to differentiate and capture the full value of their library.In upcoming posts, we will highlight some of the best examples and biggest mistakes we see in the areas of video presentation, video search, user engagement, and content monetization.
Finally, since it is Super Bowl weekend, here is a sample from the Gotuit-powered Film Room by Sports Illustrated, where viewers could see the collegiate highlights of all the players in the 2007 NFL draft - by position, player, college team, draft order, or NFL team – all using metadata to provide the different paths. Below are highlights of the Giants first round pick, Aaron Ross and the Patriots first round pick, Brandon Meriweather.
New York Giants 2007 First Round Pick - Aaron Ross, DB, University of Texas
New England Patriots 2007 First Round Pick - Brandon Meriweather, DB, University of Miami
(By the way, as a Boston company we are obviously rooting for the Pats.Prediction: 38-17 and a fourth Lombardi Trophy coming back to New England.)
Thanks for reading, and come back in a few days for “The Daily Show – What Not To Do.”
