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 Wed, Oct 22, 2008 @ 03:35 PM
Going to Digital Hollywood next week? Gotuit will be there in force, with a booth (#45) and a presence on two different panels. Gotuit CEO Mark Pascarella will first speak on Wednesday at “The Television and the PC-Mobile: Technology and Content that Bridge the Digital Consumer Experience” and then on Thursday at “Video Metadata Revolution: Unleashing the Value of Video Programming in an On Demand World”.
Wednesday, October 29th - 3:50PM
“The Television and the PC-Mobile: Technology and Content that Bridge the Digital Consumer Experience”: The combination of the TV, the set-top, the broadband connection and digital video recorder is breaking down the barriers of TV viewing experience. Every player in the entertainment and technology food chain - from content owner to middleware and headend operator, to the subscriber service provider and finally to the CE manufacturer, all play an equally key role. The idea that consumers might use a TV, demanding personal and enhanced video services, as they do a computer has arrived - and it is our job to make the future happen today. In the near future, viewers might be watching a football game and at the same time, on a second window on the TV, that viewer might also be shopping for tank-tops or buying snacks from the supermarket. That viewer might be taping a show, watching a movie and doing research for a term paper on the web at the same time. The TV set will serve as gateway to entertainment and information as sure as the computer opens the door to a world of information. TV, interactive TV, IPTV, PVR, broadband based TV, there will likely be as many ways to describe the way consumers will use and access content and programming as there are companies supplying the options. In this session we will explore that coming future.
The panel is being moderated by Allison Dollar, CEO, ITV Alliance.
The full list of panel attendees is:
- Mark Pascarella, President & CEO, Gotuit
- Braxton Jarratt, CEO, Clearleap
- David Jensen, Partner, IBM Global Business Services
- Marc Scarpa, CEO, SimplyNew
- Robert C. Raciti, Ph.D., Senior Vice President, industry advisor, GE Commercial Finance
- Colin Stiles, EVP, Sales & Marketing, Monsoon Multimedia Inc.
- Allison Dollar, CEO, ITV Alliance, Moderator
Thursday, October 30th - 2:15PM
“Video Metadata Revolution: Unleashing the Value of Video Programming in an On Demand World”: 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 panel is being moderated by Larry Gerbrandt, Principal, Media Valuation Partners.
The full list of panel attendees is:
- Mark Pascarella, President & CEO, Gotuit
- Ron Berryman, Senior Vice President, GM - FOX Stations Group, Fox Interactive Media
- Eyal Hertzog, founder and chief creative officer, Metacafe
- Josh Kline, President & CEO, Secure Path Technology
- Gary Baker, Founder and CEO, ClipBlast!
- Larry Gerbrandt, Principal, Media Valuation Partners, Moderator
This should be a great show. Hope to see you at our booth!
Posted by Patrick Donovan on Tue, Oct 21, 2008 @ 10:39 AM
The Internet has evolved from text, to images, to video and video publishers are hungry for solutions that will better drive search traffic to their video libraries. However, accurate, relevant, and useful video search remains a difficult problem that the biggest technology companies in the world are still trying to solve.
The video search engines like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Pixsy, Blinkx, Truveo, etc. all have differing approaches, but share the same fundamental unit of video in their indexes - the video asset. At Gotuit, we thought about the problem differently, and use premium scene-based metadata to vastly increase the amount of information that describes a video within any search index.
First announced last month with Pixsy, Gotuit customers can use our Video Metadata Management System to author rich, structured metadata about each individual scene in their original videos. We then syndicate an mRSS feed of the scene-level metadata to all the major search engines. Importantly, there is no video editing required so it is much simpler for the publishers to operationally manage whole assets than thousands of small clips. The metadata instead defines ‘virtual clips’ so that they can be indexed by the search engines using their current algorithms.
The video search impact is dramatic. Imagine an example of a 30 minute asset with six searchable metadata elements that now has a metadata file describing the 15 scenes within the asset, and each scene being described with ten elements. The result is a 25X increase in the amount of information that now exists in the video search engines.
Not only is there more data, but the data is more accurate and drives more relevant results due to the power of the human-authored metadata. Details like specific characters, locations, events, emotions, scene types, and other keywords are now present. Video is very subjective, and the person describing the scenes can add information that simply could not be derived by an automated solution, but would be very valuable to match against human-entered search terms.
Obviously, the ultimate goal of better video search is better monetization. As Pixsy’s CEO Chase Norland said, “Allowing our search technology to work against each scene inside an asset, instead of just the asset itself, grows the search index for each video by an order of magnitude for the user to better search against and the website to monetize.”
Not only does Gotuit metadata explode the amount of information in a video search index, all of the scene boundaries are ad insertion avails. Plus, the scene metadata can drive more targeted ads - both in-page banner and in-stream video ads. Having seen the incredible economy that has arisen over targeted text-based ads, is there any doubt that there will be a similar evolution of the video-based ad market?
Premium, scene-level video metadata is what unlocks this opportunity for video search and content monetization, and look for more developments in these areas here at Gotuit in the near future.