Comments for Gotuit SceneMaker and The Online Video Holy Grail

Gotuit SceneMaker and The Online Video Holy Grail

2006-12-13T02:33:53Z

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.

Comment from Emre Sokullu on 2006-12-12

2006-12-13T05:17:21Z

Wow that's really something we needed!

Comment from old school developer on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T09:33:02Z

Richard,

Thanks for the mention above :). One more clarification regarding MS Windows and video technology. Microsoft does have a license for MPEG-4 video technology (#205 on the list here: http://www.mpegla.com/m4v/m4v-licensees.cfm) but *does not* have a license for MPEG-4 audio technology (licensee list here: http://www.vialicensing.com/licensing/MPEG4_licensees.html). However, Microsoft does hold some if the intellectual property for MP3 though, especially for distribution on mobile devices. From my Treo 700P manual:

MPEG Layer-3 audio decoding technology is licensed from Fraunhofer IIS and Thomson. This product is protected by certain intellectual property rights of Microsoft Corporation. Use or distribution of such technology outside of this product is prohibited without a license from Microsoft or an authorized Microsoft subsidiary.

This is important because MPEG-4 media can be used as a "container" for all types of digital media. Different source media formats can be loaded into the MPEG-4 file as "tracks"; this includes animation, 3-D, and captions (text) for sub-titles. It will be important for any distributor for these new-fangled digital media services have the appropriate technology (as well as content) licenses.

The MPEG-4 video file format/structure is largely based on Apple's QuickTime file structure. QuickTime has also supported interactive features for *years*, I think as early as Quicktime 3. Interactive objects in QuickTime are called "sprites" and QuickTime movies that feature interactivity are called "wired movies".