Last week I was briefed
about a new product just released by Gotuit, called
SceneMaker. It enables
people to cut up and tag videos from platforms like YouTube or Metacafe. SceneMaker
essentially allows users to embed e.g. a YouTube video in a Gotuit page, then add
metadata around it.
I was impressed with the
usablity of SceneMaker, but one question I had was how the likes of YouTube and Metacafe
will react to having their user-generated content manipulated on another site – which
they may view as a competitor? The Gotuit folks didn’t seem concerned about this, saying
that the hosting of the videos always remains with the likes of YouTube – Gotuit simply
provides a platform to add metadata to those videos.
Techcrunch has more details about SceneMaker’s features.
Essentially this is another bit of progress in what I recently described as the holy
grail of online video, searching within videos. In that post I described
another web app, called Coull.tv – which allows users to
search for specific moments within videos, as well as click on and interact with “moving
objects”. It was
noted in the comments to that post, by regular R/WW commenter “old school developer”,
that Coull.tv is currently Microsoft Windows technology only and the ability to
manipulate or interact with objects inside video is an MPEG-4 feature.
osd was also kind enough to point me to other instances of searching within video.
VentureBeat recently
ran a story about Pluggd, which raised $1.65M on
the back of claims that it “perfects” audio and video search. Other video
search companies mentioned in that article were Pixsy,
Podzinger and CastTV.
Gotuit SceneMaker is not a Windows-only technology and it seems very slick, so this
looks like a promising product. However it remains to be seen how many users from YouTube
and Metacafe they can attract, because it seems to me they’d need to (ahem) cut into
those existing audiences to gain traction. Also getting a core community of active users
to do the majority of the video cutting and editing will be – as always – the key
challenge.
