Written by Gang Lu and edited by Richard MacManus
There
are many so-called Chinese YouTubes fighting it out on the Chinese web2.0
battleground, but one that caught our attention is Mojiti.com,
launched in November 2006. What makes Mojiti special in this market is that it
offers users a fresh experience: videos are not just available to watch and
share, you
can annotate them too! In other words, with Mojiti you can add text and graphics
to existing videos. In this post we review Mojiti and also tell you about a few new
features which haven't yet been released: a Media Center plugin, Flash
Spots, and SubRip/SubViewer.
With Mojiti, you can tell your own stories inside online videos. You can add text, hyperlinks, shapes, thought and speech bubbles, images and more - anywhere on the video screen. You can narrate your own video, subtitle videos with any language, or just comment on any scene. Mojiti's technology works by adding an overlay on top of video from all major video sharing websites (such as YouTube, Metacafe, Google Video and more). It also works on all major online video formats (Flash, Windows Media, QuickTime). Users annotate on this overlay and Mojiti synchronizes their annotations to the underlying video. Since each annotation is linked to a specific moment, users can now search inside the video and even jump to specific scenes, which makes it much easier to find out the video, or parts of it, that you're really interested with.
And of course, the personalized videos are also for sharing. Mojiti gives you different options to share your video creation - such as emailing, embedding, or even watching on your Media Center PC (using its new Media Center plug-in).
We spoke to Eric Feng, the founder of Mojiti.com. He has a few years experience in Microsoft's Seattle headquarters and he has also been a lecturer teaching on entrepreneurship at one of the best universities in China, Tsignhua University. Eric told us that unlike most Chinese startups, Mojiti.com is targeting the international market by offering an English version since launch. After only 3 months of operation, Mojiti has videos with subtitles in nearly 20 languages and it was also mentioned as a representative of web 2.0 startups in China by BusinessWeek.
A nice demo of what Mojiti can do can be found in the video below:
We were also invited to give its upcoming new version a go (see screenshot below). It features more formatting tools for annotation and a new funny annotation type called Flash Spots is introduced. The new version even supports SubViewer and SubRip files, which allows users to create subtitles in bulk.
The video-based internet market is quite crowded, but the only real competitor of Mojiti.com that we have found so far is Bubbleply.com. [Ed: Gotuit Scenemaker also lets users overlay a video, but they do it mostly for searching purposes] So what is next after YouTube? What we can say for sure is that it is definitely not just sharing!
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The "Tsignhua University" in this article should be spelled as "Tsinghua University"
Posted by: Zhibing | January 25, 2007 11:08 AM
That's a very interesting idea!
Posted by: Emre Sokullu | January 25, 2007 1:51 PM
Really respect the Chinese. Really copy to the max. Respect :)
Posted by: PohEe.com | January 25, 2007 8:46 PM
Cool! Great idea! Wish mojiti great success!
Posted by: zhenghua | January 26, 2007 3:54 AM
Hi, is this legal to have content from other websites?
Youtube, Ifilm don't loose benefits?
Posted by: motionitem | January 26, 2007 4:32 AM
Have a question for Mr. Eric Feng. Does Mojiti support profit-sharing for the advertising money with the original video creator? One video-sharing site in the U.S. does that, forgot which one. Thought that’s a real incentive for user involvement, which is the foundamental of Web 2.0. Some food for thoughts.
Posted by: Ben | January 29, 2007 11:53 PM
Hi everyone, thanks for your interest in Mojiti and for your great questions posted to Read/WriteWeb. Below are some answers, which I hope you'll find interesting:
Regarding the legality of loading FLVs from other websites with the Mojiti player... Although our approach is perhaps unusual, we feel our usage of the FLV is legal for the following reasons:
1. We only show videos from video sharing websites who allow their video content to be embedded onto other sites. We never show videos at Mojiti that are not freely available to embed onto any website.
2. We always credit the original video content provider and have a link back to the video content provider's website.
3. We never crawl video sharing websites for content. All videos on Mojiti have been explicitly added by users.
At Mojiti, we want to be very respectful of the terms of use for all the video content we show. We will always do our best to ensure that all content on our website is legally used.
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Regarding ad-revenue sharing with the video content creator... Currently we don't offer ad revenue sharing with the content creator but we do have an ad revenue share program with video content providers (i.e. Youtube, Metacafe, Mixpo, etc.) that partner with Mojiti. Ad revenue share with the content creator is certainly an interesting idea however and one that we may consider down the line.
Thanks again for your interest in Mojiti.
Posted by: Eric Feng (founder of Mojiti) | February 5, 2007 9:26 PM