Posted by Patrick Donovan on Thu, Jul 08, 2010 @ 04:37 PM
Have you checked out “Sliced and Diced” yet? This is the Gotuit-powered video portal for Hell’s Kitchen that FOX launched last month. It is the latest and greatest site we have done to date.
The first slice to notice is that this site takes advantage of our integration with Brightcove. FOX uses Brightcove as its content management system and is able to keep its existing video workflow intact for Sliced and Diced. The destination site uses the Gotuit Plugin to access and display the Gotuit metadata describing the playlists and scenes. Then when the viewer chooses the scene they want to watch, the Plugin commands the Brightcove chromeless player to play the original source asset at the specific time offset that was saved within the metadata for that scene.
The beauty is that even though the site is titled “Sliced and Diced” there is no actual video editing, or physical clips being made. So, these scenes like Things Get A Little Hot, The Big Guy’s Hungry, and VIPs in Hell’s Kitchen Tonight, look like discrete clips since they have their own title, description, thumbnail, direct URL, and tags, but they are actually defined by time offsets against the original source asset(s). The result for Fox is much less video to have to manage while still allowing the user to watch and share the parts of the show they like the best.
The second slice to notice how differently this video archive is presented from others. Because each individual scene is identified, they can be grouped into different playlists to better convert visitors to the site into viewers. For example, FOX decided the following playlists made the most sense for the top level navigation choices:
- Full Episodes – to watch the shows in linear order
- Ramsay’s Rampages – showing the master chef notorious temper
- Challenges – for watching great cooking attempts
- Dish Disasters – everyone likes watching when things go bad
- By Chef – everyone has their favorite
- Red Team / Blue Team – the best moments from each team
- Meltdowns – see when the pressure is too much
- Showdowns – unforgettable confrontations
- Punishments – relive every team punishment
- Rewards – the fruits of a job well done
- Eliminations – Ramsay’s elimination moments
This is in addition to the Latest, Best Of, Most Watched, and Highest Rated paths offered in the middle of the page. Obviously, each scene probably shows up in at least two and as many as five or six playlists. This creates the ability to better package and present the video library, and offer different navigation choices to the viewer so they can better personalize their viewing experience.
The third slice is advertising. As with every Gotuit-powered site, the temporal metadata defines the advertising inventory available for the publisher to sell. Typically, the result is a much larger amount of advertising available, as the scene boundaries are more frequent than the ad breaks that occurred during the TV broadcast. In Sliced and Diced, FOX is serving ads through the DoubleClick ad module that works within Brightcove. This is another advantage of the integration between Gotuit and Brightcove - the increased inventory created by Gotuit metadata with the ad serving options available through Brightcove and the members of the Brightcove Alliance.
For your last slice, here is the embedded player, showing some of Ramsay's Rampages. As you watch, think about how FOX is using Gotuit to meet its goals of more traffic to the site, that stay longer, and watch more video. If you have the same goals, contact us to see if we can unleash the value of your video too.
Enjoy, and look for more FOX sites going live later this summer.
The Currency of Internet Video
Learn more about how Gotuit's metadata can unleash your video's full potential.
Download this free whitepaper.
Posted by Patrick Donovan on Thu, May 13, 2010 @ 09:54 AM
Anyone else gripped by NBA Playoff fever? We here at Gotuit are, and not just because the Celtics are putting on such a show. Coming on the heels of Turner's Inside the NBA site that we power, Turner and the NBA launched another site, just for the 2010 NBA Playoffs. Called the NBA Playoffs Highlight Reel, Presented by Starbucks, this site has the best highlights from each of the 2010 NBA Playoff games starting in the second round.
Of course, these video highlights are being 
identified from the full game video using Gotuit metadata. No video editing is being done.
As you can see, the highlights are packaged in several ways to help the viewers quickly and easily find just what they want to watch.
There are playlist for each game, team, and individual player. Blocks, dunks, three pointers, big shots, and steals are also identified using metadata and presented in their own playlists.
In addition to watching great video highlights, the goal of the site is to encourage viewers to share their favorites on Facebook or via email
to their friends. Viewers can group up to three highlights into a highlight reel for sharing. Here is mine featuring the dynamic Rajon Rondo.
The other major part of this site is the integration with FreeWheel. The site is sponsored by Starbucks, and the video advertising and companion banner advertising are all served by FreeWheel. If they wanted, Starbucks could target different campaigns for different Players, Teams, Blocks, Dunks, or other structured Gotuit metadata. The combination of Gotuit with FreeWheel creates a very powerful ability to target video advertising based on metadata.
Here is hoping the Celtics can close out the Cavaliers tonight, and move on to take on the Magic. Find your favorite highlight of the playoffs so far, and send it to your friends today.
The Currency of Internet Video
Learn more about how Gotuit's metadata can unleash your video's full potential.
Download this free whitepaper.
Posted by Patrick Donovan on Tue, May 04, 2010 @ 03:43 PM
Friday, we went live with our latest customer - ABC, powering VIEWer's Choice, the new video portal for The View.
Rather than describe it myself, here is ABC's blog post announcing their new feature:
Watch All You Want with VIEWer's Choice
May 03, 2010 | Posted at 2:21 PM
Ever wanted to go back and watch a segment of The View again? Or see what's been said about a particular Hot Topic across the last few months? Or, heaven forbid, if you missed an episode somewhere along the line? We've got the goods to solve all those problems with The VIEWer's Choice!
The VIEWer's Choice makes every single topic, co-host, guest, and segment available via online video clips -- and it's also completely searchable! Want to see every time the co-hosts discussed Tiger Woods? Or politics? Or had laugh-out-loud funny moments? Or gave out Mom tips? Every bit of show content is available with just a couple of keystrokes.
Check out the VIEWer's Choice page on The View's website right here. Click around, relive some of the great moments on the show, and never have to miss a minute of The View again!
Enjoy this quick sample, where Melissa Etheridge talks about meeting the American Idol finalist Crystal Bowersox.
Will Richmond, founder of VideoNuze, also posted about this today. Here is an excerpt:
"Almost 2 years ago I wrote a post "Non-Linear Presentation + Long-form Premium Video = Big Opportunity," in which I explained how deconstructing full-length programs into searchable clips offers big opportunities to drive fan engagement and new ad inventory. With the explosion of social media like Twitter and Facebook since, the opportunity to leverage clips to promote specific moments in programs is even higher now. Looking around the web though, I'm still surprised at how many full-length programs don't take advantage of this. As "The VIEWer's Choice" demonstrates, talk shows, news and sports programming are probably the most natural fit."
Check out his full posting here.
We are thrilled that ABC has chosen the Gotuit Video Metadata Management System to unleash their video, and hope that the fans of The View love their new, more engaging viewing experience.
Content Is King, But Metadata Rules
Learn more about how Gotuit's metadata can unleash your video's full potential.
Download this free whitepaper.
Posted by Patrick Donovan on Thu, Mar 25, 2010 @ 10:11 AM
Last week, we were very happy to announce
our completed integration with Brightcove. Joint Brightcove and Gotuit customers can now utilize the best from both systems to drive the most user engagement and revenue from their broadband video.
A key feature of the integration is allowing Brightcove customers to keep their original source content within Brightcove. This keeps their existing video workflow intact while enhancing the video with Gotuit's time-based, structured metadata about each individual scene within the original source video. No video editing is required.
The way it works that we configure the customer account for VideoMarker Pro to include their Brightcove credentials. This allows the user to browse and search for video stored within Brightcove, and stream it into VideoMarker Pro for authoring the metadata. Gotuit's Video Metadata Management System then publishes out the video metadata to the customer's CDN, while the Brightcove system handles the publishing of the source video content.
The immediate impact is seen in a larger advertising inventory and an improved ability to target advertising based on video metadata. The Gotuit scene boundaries, stored as Time Start and Time Stop attributes, function as the available advertising slots. Joint customers then set up an Advertising Policy that will request an ad from their third-party advertising providers after a defined number of scenes or duration of video are watched.
When the ad is requested, structured metadata can be sent for the ad provider to use for matching and selecting the most valuable ad to return. By "structured", we mean that each Attribute has a Label and a Value. For example, Labels could include things like Player Name, Team Name, Emotion, Location, Character, Actor, Show Segment, or anything else that the customer's ad sales team wants to offer. This structure ensures that the correct attributes are sent for advertising targeting.
Joint customers will also enjoy the ability to better package and present their video with compelling playlists that take advantage of the new understanding of the contents of each individual scene. Example playlists from some of our customers include "Best of Charles Barkley" (Turner's Inside the NBA), "Boston Celtics" (ESPN's PTI), "Jordan" (CBS's Big Brother 11) where viewers can jump through the video archive and only watch those moments that most appeal to them.
We will be making announcements soon of customers that are using the joint Gotuit-Brightcove solution. In the meantime, enjoy this Gotuit-defined scene from The Dan Patrick Show on SI.com about Cornell's quest in the NCAA tournament:
Content Is King, But Metadata Rules
Learn more about how Gotuit's metadata can unleash your video's full potential.
Download this free whitepaper.
Posted by Patrick Donovan on Mon, Mar 08, 2010 @ 03:09 PM
Last week, I read Will Richmond's blog post "ABC.com is now Achieving DVR Economics for Its Programs" and was struck by this section talking about his discussion with Albert Cheng, EVP of Digital Media for Disney-ABC Television:
"Further, Albert said that there's plenty of room for improving online's economics. One key focus is increasing the ad load, possibly to as much as double the current 5 ads per program. ABC.com has experimented with this and its research shows that neither the viewer nor the advertiser experience is diminished. As a result, ABC is inclined to increase the ad load to continue improving online economics further, but is somewhat constrained by advertisers' desire to minimize clutter and their own desire to remain consistent with non-ABC sites' ad loads."
There are two main choices for increasing the advertising load in a broadband video. First, the publisher could serve back-to-back ads in the existing advertising breaks. Or, the publisher could define new advertising breaks that occur more frequently in the video and only serve one ad per break.
On TV, viewers are used to 2-3 minute ad breaks with multiple ads per ad block every 7-8 minutes. As we wrote about in our whitepaper, Content is King, But Metadata Rules, translating this to the web has some challenges. The broadband viewer has a shorter attention span, with many more available choices. There is also an expectation of an ad countdown timer in broadband that does not exist on TV. If you saw "Your show will continue in 1:30..." while watching your favorite web video because of multiple ads, aren't you more likely to switch to an IM window, check out Twitter, Facebook or some other site?
Instead of showing two ads per break every 8 minutes, publishers could show a single ad every 4 minutes. For the viewer, they get back to the content more quickly. For the advertiser, they are not bundled with other ads so ad recall should be greater. For the publisher, the viewer is more likely to stay on their site watching video - driving user engagement and session time. The graphic below taken from our whitepaper shows this transformation in advertising inventory.
The challenge then becomes - when can an advertisement be called with the least impact to the viewing experience? Where are there logical insertion points that do not interrupt dialog or disrupt the flow of the current scene of the video? How can these points be identified quickly, reliably, and cost-effectively?
This is precisely what the Gotuit Video Metadata Management System does. Our metadata defines each logical scene within the original source video, with the ability to serve ads at those boundaries. Publishers now have more monetization options and controls. No longer limited to the original ad breaks, they can serve an ad (or multiple ads) after a specified number of scenes watched, or after a specific duration of video watched. The more precise ad insertion points and larger advertising inventory give publishers the ability to optimize their user experience with their content monetization goals.
So, is it better to show multiple ads per block, or have more advertising insertion points in the content? The good news is we support both and make it easy for publishers to try different approaches to see what is best for their content and audience.
Content Is King, But Metadata Rules
Learn more about how Gotuit's metadata can unleash your video's full potential.
Download this free whitepaper.
Posted by Patrick Donovan on Thu, Apr 23, 2009 @ 11:14 AM
Last week, we released our latest whitepaper, entitled “Content is King, But Metadata Rules: Three Reasons Why Premium Metadata Delivers Premium Returns“. A must-read for digital media executives, it examines how the broadband platform and the user’s viewing behaviors demand specific strategies to drive the largest return. For those of you who want just the summary, here it is:
Summary
Because broadband viewing is very different from television viewing, publishers must not treat the “programming” of the two platforms the same. Delivering the best performance on the broadband platform requires solving the three key challenges: 1) driving a larger audience to the content, 2) delivering greater viewer engagement and longer session times, and 3) implementing an ad strategy that delivers the required revenue without harming the user experience.
Premium, scene-level metadata is the key that unlocks the full value of video libraries and solves these three challenges. By understanding the content down to the smallest usable element - the scene - the needs of the viewer, programmer, and advertiser are more effectively met. The viewer is able to personalize their viewing experience and easily get to what they want to watch, the advertiser can target their message down to most appropriate content, and the programmer realizes a larger audience that watches more video and generates more revenue. This is the roadmap to success for video on the broadband platform.
Figure 2: Gotuit-enabled advertising wheel
To give you one more incentive to read the full whitepaper, here is one of the diagrams showing how scene-level metadata transforms how publishers can serve in-stream video ads within their content.
Scene-Level Metadata Transforms Advertising For Broadband Video
Posted by Patrick Donovan on Tue, Mar 18, 2008 @ 09:10 PM
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.
SI FilmRoom: 2008 Kansas Jayhawks