For better or for worse, YouTube has just made it easier to add annotations to your videos. Annotations, which were introduced to the site last June, consist of little grey popups that can include standard text boxes or speech bubbles, or offer interactive links to other clips. They’re useful when they’re used sparingly, but can also be more than a little annoying.
To insert the annotations, users previously had to use an editor tucked under the ‘edit video’ menu. Starting this week, you’ll be able to add annotations directly using a targeting crosshair that appears whenever you view a video that you’ve uploaded. Clicking on the video will bring up a menu asking which annotation you’d like to insert, and you can use a sliding bar on the video’s timeline to determine how long each one appears. A pair of arrows appear at the bottom of the video, allowing you to jump between each annotation so you don’t have to manually watch through the video to find them all. → Read More
Google has acquired Atherton, CA based startup Omnisio, the companies are announcing this afternoon. Omnisio, which is a Y Combinator company, first demo’d to us in early March 2008, and it launched later that month. The price is not being disclosed, but we hear the deal is all cash and is in the $15 million range. The company was founded by three Australians (Ryan Junee, Julian Frumar and Simon Ratner). The service lets users annotate videos, mash various clips up, and synchronize Slideshare presentations to videos (great for conference presentations). Omnisio users can extract sections of clips they find on the web (currently only those on YouTube, Google Video, or Blip.tv). They can then take those clips and stitch them together to form new, embeddable compilations. This is yet another liquidity event for Y Combinator, which invests small amounts of capital in very early stage companies, usually at the idea stage. Reddit was acquired in late 2006, TextPayMe was bought by Amazon in 2007, and Auctomatic and Anywhere.FM were snapped up earlier this year. CrunchBase Information Omnisio Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Omnisio has launched a tool that presenters will find very useful for conveying their messages to online audiences. The new presentation tool takes slideshows uploaded in PDF format or to SlideShare and synchronizes them with videos uploaded to YouTube, Google Video or Blip.tv. The synchronization allows viewers to jump around within presentations by clicking on particular slides, which show up in an area below each video that operates much like the dock on Mac OS X. As you watch a presentation, you’ll see the current slide sitting alongside the video so you can refer to it just as you would when watching a presentation in real life. Publishers can create these video-slideshow compilations with a fairly easy drag-n-drop tool provided for free on Omnisio’s site. In addition to syncing slides, they can add markers for people and highlights that show up within a video. These too can be used to jump to particular spots during playback, such as when your favorite celebrity appears or a particularly good joke is made. This is Omnisio’s second video compilation tool. The first, which debuted in March, lets you take multiple videos found on the net and stitch them together into new mashups. http://omnisio.com/bin/Embed.swf?embedID=amNK4eirCr3BDoadbiFy2w&autoPlay=0 → Read More
Even though video has become a popular internet pastime over the past few years, there’s still a very little that average people can do with it. They can watch it, comment on it, and embed it on social networks and blogs if it tickles their fancies. Oh, and they can create it…but the majority of them won’t bother. Omnisio wants to provide more options for us less creative types. Since most people don’t have enough time, patience or skill to record their own original content, Omnisio is giving them the tools needed to create mashups of other people’s original content. As with Hulu, Omnisio users can extract sections of clips they find on the web (currently only those on YouTube, Google Video, or Blip.tv). They can then take those clips and stitch them together to form new, embeddable compilations. The process from start to finish is easy enough; just copy and paste the URLs of the videos you want, and drag a few sliders to indicate where each should begin and end. The only real beef I have with the tool is that (oddly) you can’t move the “start” slider to exactly where you want it; it only moves in 8-second increments. The “end” slider doesn’t have this problem. http://omnisio.com/bin/Embed.swf?embedID=atgGx–8ir3iR4adbiFy2w The second innovation Omnisio brings to online video is a new commenting system that places comments within videos as popup bubbles. To be fair, these aren’t entirely new to the web; iminlikewithyou users are altogether too familiar with them. But they’re fun nonetheless, and it’s nice that you can use them to annotate videos with friends without interference from the mob that overruns YouTube. Finally, the guys behind Omnisio are developing technology for combining slides with videos and tagging interesting people and highlights. The presentation functionality will essentially sync slides with various points within a video and show those slides in a dock below the video where you can click on them to skip around. Omnisio is a Y Combinator company founded by Ryan Junee, Julian Frumar, and Simon Ratner. Expect even more capabilities from them down the line intended to put a “spine” into online video. CrunchBase Information Omnisio Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
