Posted by Patrick Donovan on Fri, Aug 13, 2010 @ 07:27 PM
Golf anyone? Yesterday, we went live with our latest major implementation – this one with PGA and Turner Sports powering the video for the 2010 PGA Championship. Gotuit time-based video metadata is being used to define each shot for each golfer as they happen live across three different video feeds for the entire tournament.
As the metadata is authored live, it is then published immediately to the PGA’s live video player that is running for the event:
You can see that the user has a choice of two different camera feeds to watch, with metadata markers displayed on each so viewers can quickly get to the key moments. One feed follows the Marquee group of golfers, including Tiger Woods, Y.E. Yang, Vijay Singh, Phil Mickelson, Grame McDowell and Louis Oosthuizen. The other video feed is the Par 3 Camera feed showing all the golfers on the Par 3 holes.
As with every video scene defined by Gotuit time-based metadata, there is a distinct thumbnail, title, time offsets, and several other attributes for each video scene that drive automated playlists on other parts of the site.
For example, the video metadata is also used to incorporate video into the Leaderboard. As soon as metadata has identified a golfer’s shot, that golfer gets a video camera icon next to their name. Clicking on the camera icon brings up a Gotuit video player specific for that golfer, showing all the golfers shots from all the video feeds throughout the tournament.
Viewers can also click on a golfers name to be brought to the Player Scorecard for that golfer. For example, here is the Player ScoreCard for Tiger Woods. For any hole where there is video available, a play icon is displayed. Clicking on that hole brings the viewer to the 2010 PGA Championship Video Portal showing that specific golfer’s shots on that hole.
The Gotuit-powered 2010 PGA Championship Video Portal has all the video from all the feeds, with each shot from each golfer organized into several different playlists to help convert visitors to viewers. These include the playlists By Golfer, By Round, and By Hole. Other interesting video playlists include just the Eagles, Birdies, and Bogeys during the tournament. The Portal automatically starts playing the Key Moments when a visitor first arrives, to immerse them immediately in the very best from the tournament.
Here is the Gotuit embedded player showing the Key Moments:
This is the 92nd annual PGA Championship and as one of golf’s four major tournaments, it is an important and prestigious event. We are very excited to see Gotuit’s premium, time-based video metadata applied to the over 100 hours of video that will be streamed and broadcast live across the four days.
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, Aug 05, 2010 @ 02:23 PM
Yesterday, it was announced that Facebook bought the social networking patent portfolio owned by Friendster for $39.5 million. This included seven issued patents and eleven patent applications the earliest of which only dates back to 2006, (but is at the beginnings of social networking).
This is one of Facebook’s largest 
acquisitions ever, in terms of dollars spent. Analysts are theorizing that this helps Facebook defend itself against competing IP claims, and was necessary to put in place before executing any plans for an IPO. Clearly, IP matters.
Here at Gotuit, we have invested ferociously in our intellectual property portfolio since the very beginning of the company, dating back to 1996. To date, we have been awarded eight patents with more than a dozen pending applications.
Our IP covers the use of metadata, including time-based metadata, for the improved search, navigation, personalization, consumption, and monetization of stored media (both audio and video). So, if foundational social networking patents are worth $40 million, imagine the value of an early portfolio describing the future of media and advertising…
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, 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, Jul 14, 2009 @ 02:30 PM
Looking to cool off in the middle of summer? Check out Season Three of HISTORY’S Ice Road Truckers on Sundays at 9pm. This is HISTORY’S #1 rated series, and this season is its most dangerous yet. The drivers face fearsome storms, temperamental equipment, treacherous roads, and the pressure to deliver their loads 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska.
To go along with the linear broadcast, HISTORY chose Gotuit to deliver Ice Road Truckers Video Mash-Ups, an interactive broadband video site where fans can define their favorite scenes and mix them together into a video mash-up that they can share with the community. The Most Recent, Top Rated, and Most Viewed mash-ups are presented for fans to quickly get to the library of mash-ups. Full video search is also available.
HISTORY’S #1 Series, Ice Road Truckers
Here is the page where you can easily create your own video mash-up. In addition to the full archive from Season One and Season Two, each week new content is added from Season Three. The video is easy to navigate and discover, with folders such as Driver, Accidents, Weather, Expletives, Rivalries, and more.
This season also has the first female driver, Lisa. Check out this Mash-Up made by one of her many fans showing just some of her highlights:
Ice Road Truckers Video Mash-Ups is another great example of how to extend your relationship with your audience, allowing them to interact with your video library in a way that supports your brand and drives deeper audience engagement.
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 Thu, Jul 31, 2008 @ 03:44 PM
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.
The full panel roster includes:
· Shelly Palmer, Managing Partner, Advanced Media Ventures Group LLC (Moderator)
· Greg Smith, CTO, Move Networks
· Mark Pascarella, President & CEO, Gotuit
Thanasis Iatrou, President & CEO, Media Excel
· Chase Norlin, CEO, Pixsy
· Josh Kline, President & CEO, Secure Path Technology
· Tim Hanlon, Executive Vice President, Denuo - A Publicis Groupe Company
We have been invited to speak at a number of other conferences and events this fall, check back here for updates.
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.
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
Posted by Patrick Donovan on Fri, Feb 01, 2008 @ 02:08 PM
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.”