Tired of watching (relatively) lengthy online videos when there’s only 10, 30 or 60 seconds that you really care about? Well, viral publisher and publishing toolmaker Playbuzz has a solution called Video Snaps.
Basically, the Snaps product makes it easy for a publisher or anyone else to take an existing video and divide it into different segments, so viewers can go directly to the section that they actually care about. For example, instead of making you watch an entire speech by Donald Trump, a Video Snap by The Hill allows you to just jump straight to his comments on (say) Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. You can also share a link with friends that points directly to that section.
Yes, YouTube already offers the ability to annotate and link to a specific moment video, but the implementation is a bit clunky, and not everyone uses those capabilities. I’m definitely guilty of this myself — I’ve embedded full videos in TechCrunch and just told readers, “Go to 1:30” or something like that.
Video Snaps, on the other hand, should be pretty easy to create (judging from the quick demo that I saw) and they’re presented to viewers in a colorful, attention-grabbing format.
Of course, another way to adapt to viewers’ shrinking attention spans is to just post the 30 seconds or whatever that people care about. I mean, if that’s the only important part of the video, why bother with anything else?
The thing is, the clip that you care about may not be the clip that I care about. Or there may be three different topics or sections that I’m interested in, even if I don’t want to watch the whole video.
Shachar Orren, Playbuzz’s vice president of content, said publishers are also experimenting with the format to create new types of interactive videos. Ultimately, Orren said every viewer should have “their own personalized experience” with each video.
Orren emphasized that the Playbuzz team has worked to make the format look good on mobile. CEO Shaul Olmert also pointed to mobile video viewing experience in an emailed statement.
“People are impatient and they don’t have enough time or attention to consume a five-minute video using a mobile device because they are often multitasking while using their phone,” Olmert said. “They may be at the bus stop or waiting in line at the bank and just want to get the highlights from that weekend’s sports games. Doing that in the current form of most video content is a frustrating process of aimlessly scrolling through a video on your smartphone trying to find that one highlight at 38 seconds into the video that your friend told you about. ”
Besides The Hill, Playbuzz publisher partners experimenting with the format include Red Bull Germany, Collider and Dream Team (owned by The Sun). But again, you don’t have to be a publisher to create Video Snaps.