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.
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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
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Posted by Patrick Donovan on Thu, Feb 18, 2010 @ 09:12 AM
Thanks to Brian Deitte and the rest of the folks over at Brightcove for putting together the first Boston Brightcove Developers meetup last night. We were invited to speak and gave an overview of Gotuit and our integration with Brightcove. Specifically, we showed how video stored in Brightcove could be enabled with Gotuit's rich, scene-level metadata to improve the presentation, navigation, advertising performance, and monetization of source content. We also demonstrated our work with our latest customer - Turner Sports and Inside the NBA.
The other presentations were excellent. ScanScout gave an overview of how their advertising platform works with Brightcove, and two presenters from Brightcove showed how to enable VAST advertising and how to enable "long-form ad cuepoints". Thanks also to ScanScout for hosting the event.
If you are a Brightcove customer, or Alliance partner, I encourage you to attend these meetups in the future to get a first hand view of the latest and greatest capabilities, meet some great people, and share ideas with others in the Brightcove ecosystem.