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.

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.

Our pick is Florida’s QB Tim Tebow.  Check out his 2008 preview.

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.

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.”