ZDNet were the first to report that Gotuit Media, a company nobody has heard of, has filed suit against Microsoft for alleged patent infringements in Silverlight. If you go to the Gotuit website to see what they do, you may expect that they have built a browser-based virtual machine, with markup for defining interfaces and that their platform is starting to gain traction, but instead they are a video platform. They say on their website: “Gotuit is Video Metadata. Our patented technology enables superior video discovery and content monetization”. In real terms what they do is to take a customers video content, and then ‘enable’ it on their platform from where it can be indexed, searched and advertising can be targetted. The crux of the suit against Microsoft is that Silverlight can do all this as well. A look at the list of intellectual property that Gotuit claims shows a number of patents related to video, dating back from 1999. The patents describe video technology on the web, in what is now a generic product, but some areas describe advertising systems and recording and playback online. Gotuit was previously an online video portal, but that seems to have changed to the company being a provider of technologies related to video delivery. Silverlight is a generic development platform, it doesn’t implement the ad targeting or anything specific itself – it is up to developers to build all that out. Silverlight does however provide technologies that allow the developer to easily track visitors, to overlay images, alpha-channels, cross-domain content (see the Mix 08 keynote, and this Mix 08 session on advertising with Silverlight.) and this can be combined into a very very effective advertising system. Gotuit must be looking at the NBC Olympics website, which is built in Silverlight, in envy as they built it in a matter of months and at the moment it is probably the richest video experience on the web. They are within their rights to attempt to attempt to sue Microsoft, but it isn’t fair that these companies become the gatekeepers of a technology which is nothing more than television online (with the benefits of the web such as search, ad targetting etc.). There are flaws in the patent system in the USA, and it is no longer serving its original purpose. Incremental technology improvements become solid blocks of intellectual property because of patents, and it means → Read More
Gotuit made an “about face” when they ditched their online TV product (except for music videos) and refocused on powering video sites. Over the past year they’ve been striking deals to power video services for the likes of Sports Illustrated, EMI, Fox Reality, amongst others. Now they’re powering Extreme Outdoor TV network (XONTV), a web site dedicated to outdoor lifestyle videos. Gotuit’s video suite lets lets XONTV deep tag key points in videos. These tags form part of the meta data Gotuit uses to index and search through movies, making it possible to easily re-order short clips of long videos on demand. In XONTV’s case, you can easily search all their full length hunting videos for instances of deer or pheasant. In the case of the NFL draft, you could pull all of an athlete’s key moves from game highlights. Other players are tackling the problem of in-video search as well. Everyzing and Blinkx process videos using speech and video analysis. Other services such as Veotag, Viddler, and MotionBox. CrunchBase Information Gotuit Media Viddler blinkx EveryZing Veotag Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Gotuit will launch a social video tagging service on Tuesday that allows users to cut and tag any online video from any source. Gotuit is a video host for online video, mobile video, and cable TV. But unless you’re YouTube, you can’t compete in online video without a new bag of tricks. Contextual cutting and tagging is Gotuit ‘s new trick. “We are launching [this] to give the power of tagging video to the community,” said Gotuit president Mark Pascarella. “So you can take the best parts of a video and tag inside the file.” Gotuit gave TechCrunch a demo last Friday and showed how users can take any online video from any source and use their Web application to work with it. There is no application to download. It reminded me a lot of Podzinger, a podcast tagging application, except Podzinger is not human-powered like SceneMaker. SceneMaker tags come from human insight, not speech or video recognition. Once you are in SceneMaker, you can upload an existing Web video from its URL. When the video starts playing in SceneMaker, users can click the progress bar to stop it at any time and create pieces of the video that are assigned separate tags and descriptions. Each piece of the video then gets its own embed code and URL. With the embed code, users can republish the video wherever they’d like. With the URL, they can email, IM, or share however they see fit. Once videos have been edited in SceneMaker, each Gotuit URL/embed code will re-direct users back to the video’s place of origin where it will play just the tagged version. In this way, users who watch the tagged portion don’t know that they are only watching a portion of the original because the video itself has not been altered. Pascarella said that this will help users cut through the hours and hours of useless content to “get to the good stuff.” “There is just so much content and too many videos out there right now,” he said. “The explosion of content requires better navigation. We’re not promoting that existing video be altered. We just want to give users the ability to flush out what interests them.” Gotuit has six patents on this technology, which they began petitioning for in 1996. “We always knew online video would be big and our vision was always that video should be a → Read More
Boston based Gotuit Media launched Gotuit late Sunday evening. Gotuit offers users on-demand free premium content like music videos, sports clips and short films (the stuff that gets deleted from YouTube). Find what you want, click it and watch it immediately. The site is Flash based and will have a familiar interface for YouTube users. This isn’t about long tail user generated content, though. Gotuit has struck licensing deals with labels and other content owners to show a deep library of premium content. See, for example, the music section. At launch they have over 2,000 music videos (compare to iTunes, which has “3,000+”), fully licensed for streaming to users on the site for free. The also have deep content in sports, news and movies, including short films. The site will eventually have advertising around the content, as well as 15 second video ads between plays. This revenue will be shared with the content owners. Gotuit has added some very nice touches. First, a minor point, but I like that you can browse around the site without losing the stream of the video you are currently watching. Second, videos load and play very, very fast. I don’t know if they’ve done this by cutting up the media files into smaller download chunks or some other technical trick (they wouldn’t tell me in the briefing), but when you click on a video it fires up and plays immediately. Third, if you choose to register for the site you can create playlists of videos, a very useful way to bookmark favorite content. You can only create one large playlist per category (music, news, etc.), though, and you can’t mix different types of content within a playlist. Building out functionality around the playlists will be trivial for them, though, and I imagine we’ll see updates there soon. Fourth, they are adding deep tagging features that will allow users to jump right to specific parts of videos – an important feature when reviewing sports footage, for example (and while we are on the topic of sports, don’t miss the cheerleader tryouts in that area of the site. ). A mobile version is “on the way”. A final thought. I like Gotuit in a way that I like Pandora. I can imagine playing this in the background daily at my computer or in the living room during parties. Pandora has a great flash player for music → Read More
