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.

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.

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.

Yesterday’s announcement of our completed integration with Move Networks was a major milestone for Gotuit on a few dimensions.

First, it means any video publisher that is currently using Move Networks, or thinking about switching to Move for their premium video quality, now can take advantage of Gotuit’s ability to deliver personalized, non-linear viewing experiences that will serve (more) advertising along the way at precise advertising insertion points.

We have proven our ability to surface a video archive and improve its shelf-life by exposing it in a variety of playlists or navigational paths. This is done without doing any video editing. For example:

• Sports content By Team, By Player, Event, Top 10 Plays, Goals, etc.
• Comedy or drama content By Character, By Topic, By Plot Line, Best Scene;
• Entertainment content By Artist/Performer, By Song, By Event, By Date;
• Searching within the video;
• Jumping to any scene of interest;
• Defining your own scenes and remixes then sharing them with friends.

This flexibility fundamentally changes how publishers using Move can present and monetize their content. (Check out XONtv at www.xontv.tv to see this first hand.)

Second, this adds to the list of video codecs which Gotuit has enabled. Publishers can stream broadband video in Flash, h.264, and now Move Networks and use Gotuit. In fact, XONtv originally went live with Flash last November (as announced here) and was converted to Move. In our past, we have also powered MPEG-2 for cable VOD and 3GPP for mobile applications. This highlights how Gotuit’s rich metadata is independent of video codec or distribution platform.

Third, this announcement is the latest in a series of Gotuit integrations with other companies in the broadband video ecosystem. Our focus is on delivering technology and tools to author scene-level metadata and advertising insertion points. Integrating our video metadata management system with partners such as CDNs (like Akamai), ad providers (like DoubleClick & Advertising.com), and content management systems (like Move Publish) allows publishers with existing video workflows to easily adopt Gotuit. Look for more integrations with other content management systems to be announced soon. (If you are a potential partner and would like to discuss an integration, let us know at partners@gotuit.com.)

Or, if you are a Move Networks customer looking to improve your user experience, session time and/or advertising inventory, drop us a line at sales@gotuit.com.