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.

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.

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.

Answer - we each have products that were selected, along with six other companies, in the 2008 Streaming Media Editor’s Picks. This annual list, recently published in the 2008 Streaming Media Industry Sourcebook and online at streamingmedia.com here , highlights “the top ten products and services in the streaming and online video industries in the last year.”

Here is what Streaming Media editor Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen wrote about our flagship product: “The Gotuit PowerVideo Suite is the only product in our Editor’s Picks list that also took home a Streaming Media Reader’s Choice Award (Oct/Nov pp.30-42). That award was in the Search and Indexing Platform category, but the VideoDiscovery Module is only part of the PowerVideo Suite’s four-pronged attack. Granted that’s a terrific app for both viewers and advertisers - videos in a library are marked with metadata for each logical scene, and then scenes are categorized into playlists based upon that metadata - but the VideoMarker and VideoMixer modules are equally impressive. The former lets users themselves control the marking and tagging of their favorite clips, while the latter allows publishers to give users various degrees of control over the metadata, building far richer search and indexing experiences than would otherwise be possible.”

The full list of 2008 Streaming Media Editor’s Picks is as follows: Accordent Media Management System, Adobe Media Player, Apple iPhone, Elgato Turbo.264, Gotuit PowerVideo Suite, Microsoft Expression Encoder, Mogulus Live Broadcast, Rhozet Carbon Coder, ViewCast Niagara GoStream Plus, and Wowza Media Server Pro.

It is an honor to be acknowledged by such an authority on the industry, and alongside such prominent companies and compelling products. We have been building out our patented video metadata technology for over eight years, and this recognition is a tremendous validation of our unique approach to unleashing video libraries.

Click here to see our official announcement.

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

This week, we were extremely proud to announce our entry into the Educational video market with Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. Carleton University has a long history of using video to augment the students’ learning process, and for the past three years has offered all its courses through its video on demand service.

Starting this semester, Carleton students can take advantage of VideoNotes™, an on-line video portal powered by Gotuit that lets students annotate the classroom lecture video and create remixes that can be used as study guides for particular topics.

Students can mark scenes from the lecture video, give those scenes their own title, description and keywords, and create a remix/mashup with both scenes they defined as well as scenes defined by others.

Students can now effectively search inside the two-hour lecture videos to find the specific topics of interest, and share what they find or create with the community. This is all achieved leveraging metadata, without any video editing or new videos being stored.

Here is a link to one student’s highlights from Lecture 4 of Professor Dan McIntyre’s Introduction to Psychology course, dealing with Motivation: http://videonotes.carleton.ca/?mid=25.

VideoNotes is another great example of using the power of metadata to deliver a personalized viewing experience that optimizes the value of the video library. Allowing the students themselves to define what is relevant further engages them in the learning process and deepens their understanding of the content.

(And to be clear, we also believe they should still go to class and not just watch video.)