Reality Check: Veotag

Veotag, Inc. enables people to place navigation tags in video and audio files. For example, if a speaker uses the top-ten format, you can tag where each section begins.

Listeners/viewers can then click on tags to navigate the digital content. Think of this as adding a table of contents to audio or video. Search engines can index these tags, so digital content will show up in search results. Here are several samples to illustrate the concept.

• Speeches by Guy Kawasaki: The Art of the Start and The Art of Innovation

• Majora Carter's speech at the TED Conference with Guy’s tags to highlight her techniques.

• Audio: Garage’s venture capital panel

• High School Baseball: Westfield versus Dayton

• Video documentary: Apollo 11

• Distance Learning: Teaching Dance Remotely

• Jazz at Lincoln Center: Wynton Marsalis Interview

Here’s an example of a Google search that returns a link that, when followed, takes you inside a video. Search for “SwiftKids Dora” at Google or click on this link.

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Comments

[UK Online Delicatessen - Buy Gourmet & French Food Online]

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[Jeffrey Paul]

Seems like Jayson has missed the point of Veotag. For end users, Veotag makes any streaming online video (and audio) easier to consume, navigate, search, provide additional contextual information, and share with others. Veotag has a very clean authoring tool that can be used by non-technical people. Veotag works on local and remote streaming video files. Jayson misses the point that the publisher of the content may not want the video file downloaded and doing so may violate terms of use and copyright law. I am very impressed with Veotag's offerings to date and look forward to watching this company mature very closely

[Jayson Elliot]

Veotag might seem great to the people serving up videos, but for the end user, it's a non-starter. In an environment where Google Video allows direct downloads for portable players, and sites like YouTube and MetaCafe can be easily downloaded from via a third party site or app, it's positively 20th century to force people to sit at their computer to watch an entire video of any length, never mind the fact that streaming video is subject to the whims of one's internet connection.

This would have been revolutionary technology in 2001, but today it looks more like "got a hammer, find a nail." The problem it purports to solve is only a problem when one doesn't allow viewers to download the video in the first place.

[Grace]

Dror: Intelligent people put comments in the proper columns.

[SwiftKids Advertising]

Well worth what we paid for it. Veotag has helped our business by giving perspective clients an easy way to view our commercial reel. The tags allow them move directly to the spots they are most interested in. A good investment.

[Dror]

Seth, a marketing tip: Intelligent people never buy a book that has a cover page with the author name in a larger font that the book's title.

[Rita Plotkin]

Veotag is fantastic. It offers unparalleled opportunities in training. Consider for example, using case-based studies for training social workers, analysts, customer service employees, etc.

Obviously, if we could we would not pay for electricity either; however, we do ... because the benefits greatly outweigh the cost.

[Walter]

We pay for it, and are very happy with the results.
For an SMB, Veotag takes care of everything, tapes our conferences and presentations and sets them up on the web. The tagging is easy for us to do and makes the videos presentable and easy for our audience to use.
We have doubled the number of people who see our presentations by making them available on the web, tagged.

[Darek S]

It`s useful, but I would never pay for it.

[Jerry B. Altzman]

I guess I wasn't clear enough -- Veotag is a really good service (and extremely handy) and fills a much-needed niche in self-publishing of videos (that, e.g. Youtube and google video completely miss). My only complaint is the /small/ malinteraction with FF, which is easily enough fixed by adding the WMP activeX control for firefox...

[Jerry B. Altzman]

Nice service, more "user friendly" than digging out Quicktime Pro and trying to deal with that...I just wished it didn't require IE (or a 3rd party FF extension) to work right.

[Howard]

veotag apears to be a wonderful tool. The ability to use search engines to locate titles in a video and then immediately jump to that part of the video is very cool.

[Barbara Rhodes]

Viva le Veotag!

[Arkady]

I would like to make a comment on the remark that Charles made. Veotag is not merely "re-packaging" of already existing QuickTime features. Instead it brings such features to a much wider audience who do not necessarily know how to use QuickTime or Flash, or Windows Media, or know Codec from a Kodak. Now ANYONE can make searchable bookmarks in virtually ANY video. I can make comments about a news analysis on a CNN video or a comment on a radio podcast, and then send someone a link to THAT spot. Furthermore - my 14 year old daughter can do it ( and she is not a hacker). That IS building on technological advances that exist, and are out of reach of everyday folks.
THAT is innovation.....

[Charles]

In hindsight, my previous comment might appear to praise this product, which was not my intention at all. Far from it. There is nothing remotely "brilliant" about copying features in QuickTime and implementing them in a new proprietary format.

I often wonder what truly brilliant technological feats might have been achieved if people didn't spend so much time reinventing the wheel, and instead, built upon the strengths of those previous products.

[gahlord]

Re: Licensing

I just spoke with Jeffrey Paul, a VP at Veotag and he explained to me that their business version of veotag allows the user to retain copyright control of their uploaded content.

Which, as far as I'm concerned, works. The pricing is reasonable and the ability to maintain IP control surpasses that of commonly used video services in existence today.

In addition, he spoke with me very quickly after I commented and seemed like a straightforward, responsive guy.

Impressed me anyway.

g

[gahlord]

Great idea of a service, as noted above. However, for a content creator maybe not so great.

From their terms:

"For clarity, veotag retains all ownership rights in the text you submit to veotag as part of your User Submissions. However, by submitting the User Submissions to veotag, you hereby grant veotag a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the veotag Website and veotag's (and its successor's) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the veotag Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels. You also hereby grant each user of the veotag Website a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Website, and to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display and perform such User Submissions as permitted through the functionality of the Website and under these Terms of Service."

Now if this same sort of service existed connected to a creative commons license. . . then viewers and content-creators could use it safely.

[Graydon]

Sounds interesting... and one step closer to being able to insert ads dynamically into video... as talked about here...

http://marlincreek.com/content/view/77/35/

I think there's plenty of people out there that could use this... but haven't figured it out yet... i.e. Church putting up the Sunday service online with links to the different sections of the service (watch the choir, skip the sermon or vice versa). The simplicity should help in adoption as well.

[Chuckk Gerwig]

my corrected url here. previous post was incorrect.

[Walt Schlender]

This is cool. I've seen something which it reminds me of... http://click.tv It's streaming flash video where the community tags different frames and then people who view the site can shift around in the video based on the tags in the video.

[Charles]

Positively brilliant. They've duplicated some features in QuickTime, the stuff that already exists, but nobody bothers to use.

[Andy A.]

This is great! It's like a streaming DVD!

[Michael Martine]

This is exactly the kind of thing I imagine a larger entity would see as an acquisition target, and rightly so. Google Video has a way to link to certain points during a video, but Veotag's system would be better and would offer something nobody else would have (until they copied it, but it would be nice from Google's point of view to be the leader and not the follower on this one).

[Wolf-Dieter Grabner]

Generally speaking, the application is "quite ok". Nevertheless, at least for me, it misses the special point. I'm quite sure all of the big players are going to add similar features to their video formats soon (Should even be possible with WMV9 right now).

Don't forget the viewer, at the moment it's concentrated on the broadcast view (not using the Internet's capabilities).

What I'd like to see, in addition to the neat interface, is a form of "social bookmarking", perhaps a kind of deli.cio.us for Video. Add a comment function and some collaborative features (say Wiki/Blog) and it could be an interesting tool for e-learning or knowledge management applications.

So in my opinion, it's on the right way but not yet there.

[jeff paul]

I really like the veotag service. Adding menus , descriptions and annotations to my own videos, and other's videos is a great feature. It makes the content of the video searchable and much easier to navigate. Thumbs up on veotag