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
Thanks for reading, and come back in a few days for “The Daily Show – What Not To Do.”
