Posted by Patrick Donovan on Tue, Feb 02, 2010 @ 02:32 PM
World Wrestling Entertainment’s Smash-Ups site has just been updated with highlights from Friday Night Smackdown and Monday Night RAW, featuring the return of Brett “The Hitman” Hart.
Here’s a quick sample smash-up of “The Hitman”.
Visitors to WWE Smash-Ups, powered by Gotuit, can access WWE’s huge library of video content and get directly to their favorite Superstars or Divas using Gotuit’s premium, scene-based metadata. It’s simple to create cool remixes / smash-ups and share them with your friends. Check it out here!
Posted by Patrick Donovan on Wed, Sep 30, 2009 @ 02:07 PM
You are a video publisher and you want to drive more engaged viewers and better monetization. What tactics or options do you have to better present your video and make it easier and more fun for your viewers to watch it?
Here at Gotuit, we wanted to draw your attention to one of our latest innovations that is being put to good use by our customers such as ESPN, CBS, Sports Illustrated, and others. We call it “Mini-Nav“, a Flash overlay that displays each individual scene within the video that the viewer chose to watch. Simply mouse over the video, and it appears - showing the thumbnail of each scene and the title and description for each scene at the top. Move your mouse off of the video and it disappears. This is true in both the on-page player and off-page embedded player.
Check it out for yourself with yesterday’s episode of Pardon The Interruption at ESPN.com:
Did you notice how the Gotuit Mini-Nav is like the broadband equivalent of the Rundown that ESPN shows on the right-hand side of the linear broadcast? The big difference of course, is that you the viewer have the control to choose which scene to watch next. Instead of watching the show on your TV and having to wait for them to get to the story about your favorite team, you can go right to it.
Here’s another example, from Big Brother 11 that Gotuit is powering on CBS.com. In this one, notice how when you go and choose to watch your second scene, the player will show you an ad:
So, Gotuit’s scene-by-scene navigation not only engages and delights the viewer but also allows the publisher to serve ads in between the scenes. This is a unique way to deliver a superior user experience with superior monetization.
If you are interested in learning how we can enable scene-by-scene navigation for your video, drop us a line.
Posted by Patrick Donovan on Wed, Jul 01, 2009 @ 12:52 PM
Our office is now located at the brand-new TradeCenter 128 building directly fronting Route 128 and Interstate 95 in Woburn, MA. The new mailing address is 400 TradeCenter, Suite 3890, Woburn, MA 01801. Our phone and fax numbers remain the same. Drop by if you are in the area!
Posted by Patrick Donovan on Wed, May 20, 2009 @ 10:08 AM
Last week at the Streaming Media East 2009 show in NYC, we gave a 20 minute overview of the Gotuit Video Metadata Management System, and announced our latest customer - HISTORYTM, with Ice Road Truckers Video Mash-Ups.
The good folks at Streaming Media just posted video from the event. For those of you not able to make it, you can watch our presentation here.
It describes how broadband video publishers can tap the power of premium, scene-level metadata to drive more visits, longer session time, and greater content monetization, no matter what content delivery network (CDN), content management system (CMS), or advertising partners they use. Enjoy!
Posted by Patrick Donovan on Thu, Mar 26, 2009 @ 04:37 PM
We were happy to announce this week our fourth season of powering QuickKicks for Major League Soccer. Completely redesigned, this year has all of our premium video navigation and discovery features as well as a remix capability.
A key question we ask all our customers is, “How can you best convert your visitors to viewers?” For many sites, the common tactics are just a list of clips in order of most recent to oldest and a search box. Major League Soccer is using Gotuit to better organize and present their content so that there are more interesting playlists and a more engaging viewing experience to covert those visitors.
For example, MLS chose to layout their video with the following top level choices:
- One Touch - this will show the star MLS players and all their best plays
- Amazing Plays - only the best of the best across all the games
- Games of the week - where each game gets its own playlist
- Archive - every game from past weeks
Within any game, the editorial choices are:
- Game Highlights
- Goals
- Saves
- Player Spotlight #1
- Player Spotlight #2
The result is that visitors are drawn to personalize their experience, by choosing the best plays, or just the goals, or just their favorite players.
For example, here is the first goal in franchise history for the Seattle Sounders FC:
Better content presentation results in increased traffic and longer session times.
MLS took it even further this year by enabling user-authored remixing. This deepens the engagement with the audience, by allowing them to create their own highlight reels and then share them with the community. The community can vote on their favorites here in the gallery. Here is one I liked called The Yellow Card March:
When a user creates their own remix, they are motivated to share the link and/or embed the video, as you can see on the March 24th post in the popular soccer blog (The Footy Blog) here.
All of this is accomplished using Gotuit metadata which acts as a lens into the original, unedited source game video. No video editing or clipping is ever done.
With rich, structured metadata, publishers can unleash the full value of their video libraries. For MLS, this means knowing the Team, Week, Player(s), Play Type(s) of each individual scene in their game video and leveraging that information into a better user experience.
Are you doing all you can to convert your visitors to viewers?
Posted by Patrick Donovan on Wed, Mar 18, 2009 @ 01:12 PM
WWE just released another promotional video both on their site on YouTube, encouraging people to use WWE Smash-Ups. This one features The Miz and John Morrison.
Enjoy!
Posted by Patrick Donovan on Fri, Mar 13, 2009 @ 09:44 PM
If you are a long-form video publisher looking for better ways to engage your audience, check out what we have just done with World Wrestling Entertainment. As part of their promotion leading up to Wrestlemania 25, WWE has put together a video application called WWE Smash-Ups. Powered by Gotuit, this application lets fans access highlights from 25 years worth of thrilling WWE video, then create their own 2 minute highlight reel. The best highlight reel will win $5000, and there are other prizes as well.
The Smash-Ups defined by the viewer take advantage of Gotuit’s advanced metadata capabilities that allow viewers to define their own favorite scenes from within long-form video and then put those scenes together in a custom order. No new video files are actually created, making it easy and efficient to scale. They also have the ability to associate an audio bed to the remix.
This builds on our other remix implementations with customers such as Lifetime, but there are several major technical improvements that we did to handle the large amount of WWE traffic and to deliver the best user experience. Try it out and take notice of the vastly simplified scene-authoring and remix-creation process. There are also new feeds for the Top 100 based on user voting and Most Watched Smash-Up, both on an all-time and weekly basis.
The site leverages our integration with both DoubleClick and Advertising.com to serve in-stream and in-page advertising. Our flexible advertising policy capabilities allow WWE to set exactly the amount of advertising they want to serve based on either the amount of video watched or the time on site.
We think the site looks tremendous, thanks to our partnership with Brothers By Choice, the agency who created the outstanding graphics.
It is being heavily promoted by WWE, both on their site as well as Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube. They even have the WWE Superstars getting into it. Enjoy this promotion video starring the Bella Twins:
Go check out WWE Smash-Ups, and if you are a long-form video publisher looking for better monetization and user engagement, think about how you could make your archive available to your audience and let them define their own favorite moments and remixes. It’s a great way to drive incremental viewing.
Posted by Patrick Donovan on Wed, Oct 29, 2008 @ 10:23 AM
We have been powering Major League Soccer’s QuickKicks video portal for the past three seasons. Using our premium, scene-based metadata viewers can choose any game, and then watch playlists of just the Highlights, Goals, Saves, Set Pieces, Best Runs and player spotlights from each team. Any scene can be directly linked to, or embedded using the metadata.More and more, soccer fans are using the site to get the best moments of the games to insert in their blogs - which is exactly the kind of viral sharing that helps to drive more traffic for MLS.
For example, check out this post by Jack Bell in the New York Times last week, in their soccer blog called Goal. It talks about an unbelievable goal by the Danny Ceperos, the goalkeeper for the New York Red Bulls, to help power their 3-1 win against Columbus, and uses the Gotuit embedded video player to show readers that exact play.
The same highlight was grabbed by Ives Galarcep, another soccer blogger here. Note that after watching the highlight, viewers can choose to watch more scenes from the game video, which brings them back to the QuickKicks portal in the context of that scene.
Driving more visit traffic is just one of the major benefits of having rich, scene-based metadata. To learn more about how to unleash the full value of a video library using video metadata, read our latest whitepapers.
Posted by Patrick Donovan on Fri, Sep 05, 2008 @ 09:03 AM
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.
Posted by Patrick Donovan on Wed, Apr 23, 2008 @ 03:48 PM
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.