Gotuit Integrates Technologies with thePlatform, DoubleClick, Pixsy

Gotuit Media--a company that offers metadata technologies which, among other things, allow end-users to instantly access the parts of a piece of video that interest them, and which can also be used by video publishers to allow end-users to make mash-ups out of their content (note: earlier this year, the company filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, claiming that the latter's Silverlight technology infringes on its patents)--has announced a number of new deals over the past few weeks:

• The company has integrated its technologies with thePlatform, a subsidiary of cable MSO Comcast that provides white-label video management and publishing services for broadband, mobile and TV. According to the companies, the integration means that video publishers that are using thePlatform's Media Publishing System to manage their video can now use Gotuit's Video Metadata Management System (VMMS) to author scene-level metadata that will improve the presentation, personalization, discovery, advertising inventory and monetization of their broadband video libraries. "Today's announcement with thePlatform is the latest in a series of integrations that connect our hosted metadata solution with the professional video ecosystem," Gotuit CEO, Mark Pascarella, said in a prepared statement. "Many of the world's leading video publishers have chosen thePlatform as their content management system, and this integration enables these publishers to achieve a new level of content presentation and monetization using Gotuit's patented technology and premium metadata." Gotuit bills its VMMS as transforming video libraries by utilizing metadata to define the smallest usable elements within original source videos: the individual scenes. According to the company, these scenes can then be used to "dramatically impact the key dimensions" that drive a video's performance; it claims that: 1) visit traffic increases due to a) increases in repeat visits, b) more viral sharing of scenes and playlists, and c) greatly enhanced, scene-level mRSS feeds out to video search engines; 2) session time increases, due to a significantly improved user experience, where viewers can enjoy a personalized mode of viewing that allows them to get directly to the scenes of greatest interest to them; and 3) monetization increases, due to the combination of longer session time with a larger ad inventory from the "more precise and flexible ability" to serve in-video ads at any scene boundary. According to Gotuit, publishers can use its video metadata authoring application, VideoMarker Pro, to define scene-level metadata for video assets managed within thePlatform; the metadata is then managed by Gotuit's hosted data service, Gotuit Metadata Services, the company says, and is served via the publisher's content delivery network to the destination Web page. Gotuit says it has several player templates available, as well as documented player components, allowing customers to built their own "Gotuit-powered playback experience."
• The company has integrated its technologies with Google's DoubleClick, a move that it says will enable Gotuit customers to serve video advertising with the DoubleClick In-Stream solution within Gotuit-powered player environments. "Our mission at Gotuit is to transform publishers' ability to monetize their content by harnessing the power of the individual scene," Gotuit's Pascarella said in a prepared statement. "Combining our world-class advertising insertion capability with the world-class advertising services of DoubleClick is an ideal match for publishers to unleash the full value of their video libraries." Gotuit claims that the scene-level metadata enabled by its platform defines the optimal in-stream video ad-insertion points, allowing publishers greater advertising control and flexibility. Gotuit customers can, for example, set ad request logic based on a viewer's session time and/or the number of scenes watched, across the entire library, the company says. According to Gotuit, as a result of the new mid-roll ad opportunities its technologies enable, Gotuit-enabled publishers have far greater ad inventories than those limited to just pre- and post-roll ads. The company also claims that the ads served can be targeted based on scene metadata, such as Character, Player, Topic and Keyword: when making the ad request, the Gotuit scene metadata can be sent to DoubleClick for delivery of the most appropriate and valuable advertisement, the company says. The Gotuit-DoubleClick joint advertising solution is currently live with Sports Illustrated's 2008 Heisman Watch video portal (see below).
• Sports Illustrated has tapped the company to power its 2008 Heisman Watch broadband video portal (note: Gotuit also powered a Heisman Watch portal for Sports Illustrated last year). The portal, which is sponsored by Nissan, offers a searchable database of video highlights from the top NCAA college players, organized by player, position, school, or Sports Illustrated's own rankings. As a result of Gotuit's new deal with DoubleClick, it displays in-stream video ads delivered by the latter company: viewers are shown a pre-roll ad on their first video, then will not see an ad again for a certain time period set by Sports Illustrated, regardless of where they navigate in the portal. According to Gotuit, this drives viewers to sample more player video while seeing the appropriate number of ads along the way. Sports Illustrated can configure logic for pre-roll, mid-roll or post-roll ads, and can have separate logic for the in-page player and the embedded player for off-site viewing. Other key features of the portal, according to Gotuit, include: instant access to favorite highlights (viewers can jump inside a video directly to a specific play); weekly updates for each player's games, with navigation to specific plays; the ability for viewers to embed any highlight into their own blog or site; and deep video search and navigation capabilities across the portal's entire video library.
• The company has partnered with Pixsy, a B2B provider of private-label video and image search, in order to enable it to offer what it bills as a "greatly enhanced" video search and syndication capability. According to the company, the deal means that customers of its Gotuit Video Metadata Management System (VMMS) can now have mRSS feeds of their Gotuit-powered video library published to and ingested by Pixsy's Media Search Platform to drive greater traffic and monetization. "Video search is a difficult problem that Gotuit's premium metadata is ideally suited to solve," Gotuit's Pascarella said in a prepared statement. "By publishing a detailed set of information about each individual scene within the source video asset, the amount of information in a search index about a video library explodes. Our customers love the fact that by using Gotuit they can publish between 10x and 25x more data to the video search providers like Pixsy. This directly translates into increased traffic." The Gotuit-Pixsy partnership means that video publishers' scene-level metadata can be syndicated through mRSS feeds to Pixsy, for inclusion in its Video Search Playback (VSP) platform: each scene has a thumbnail, title, description, direct URL link, embedded player code and other structured attributes defined by the publisher; thus, instead of a single asset in the mRSS feed, each scene is individually identified via this metadata. Pixsy can then use this to drive more traffic back to the original site, Gotuit says, or to offer far more video elements within its VSP, enabling publishers to enjoy greater monetization when their content is watched off-site. In addition to greatly increasing the number of items within a search index due the scene definition, Gotuit claims, the metadata describing the scenes can be more accurate and precise, and contain new information that cannot be determined from a simple speech-to-text or computer vision approach. Gotuit customers can add their own information about each scene, including such elements as Emotion, Location, Plot Line, and Topic; this, the company says, "significantly enhance[s] the breadth of information available for video search."