Click.tv Moves Video Ideas Forward
Michael Arrington
33 comments »
As I’ve mentioned, the online video space is evolving extremely fast, with new companies launching just about every week. Click.tv will soon be joining the crowd with a compelling offering.
Macromedia, by the way, is a major source of the creativity. Just about everyone is transcoding to Flash to show the videos to users, and the new Flash tools are allowing developers to do really interesting things with video, like deep tagging and annotations.
Click.tv is showing off some of this potential. It hasn’t launched yet, but it does have a good demo site up that shows what the main functionality will include: the ability for the creator and those who watch the video to add annotations anywhere in the stream, and others later to click on those annotations and jump right to that point in the video.
Like YouTube, Click.tv will also give people a simple code snippet to add a video directly to another website. The snippet can include any subset of the annotations. See this features page for an overview.
As soon as I have a chance to demo the product directly I’ll add a full review. I do not yet know how they plan to handle video uploads (via a Grouper/VideoEgg type client uploader or a YouTube straight upload to the site), and whether or not they’ll allow tagging of videos and video segments. The deep tagging features of Motionbox are compelling.
Yup, do you think this will be useful to anyone except bloggers. I think CNN or another online news vendor should buy this technology for their video.
Saul, sure, I’d love to use this for my own home videos, too. Although I’d be sharing them on my personal blog with friends and family.
Testing out the demo now. This is REALLY useful technology. I have to agree with you Saul. CNN or similar outlets would provide a value service offering this with their video. It allows you go directly to the segment of the video that you need..quickly. This is nice. However, I think this would be useful to the mass market not just bloggers Saul.
Now if they can only pull this type of deep tagging from cable TV so that I can search my cable box (and DVR) for all shows containing my keywords.
I would love to be able to skip to the section of SportCenter that shows only my favorite teams. Doing a quick search for “Clemson” or “Panthers” would jump me to the exact spot in the show that showed anything about Clemson University or the Carolina Panthers (and I guess the Florida Panthers). I’d be able to get my TV news like I do my RSS and email feeds. I’d save myself an hour each day by not having to watch the entire episode of SportsCenter should I choose to only view the clips that interest me.
Somebody please make this happen.
Michael - yeah, I guess so. I still think that these video companies need to think about monetizing… and this seems like a perfect fit for a ‘for business model’, like Movable Type. There are simple way too many online video players.
Andy — you might be interested in some of the work we’re doing at ITP Research. A project I’m working on basically ties video commenting with MythTV. It’s all very alpha-stage right now, but the functionality you’re discussing is definitely being worked on (by us, and I’m sure by others!)…
Great to see the comments for that video are full of spam. Unprofessional.
Hi - I’m CEO and founder of Click.TV. Thanks to all for the positive comments! I want to clear up a couple misperceptions:
1) Click.TV’s business models is *not* to compete w/ sharing sites. Our focus is any site that has videos. We’s like them to use our technology for their video user interface, and we’re prepared to make that happen today. Thus, from that POV, what we’re showing is not half-baked as some have concluded.
2) There is no spam in those comments.
Mike L: so you’ll be cozying up to the new services?
We’re in many discussions w/ video-centric sites now, and I expect even more will start now that blogs like this one have picked up on us.
One (flattering) way to think about us is as the Levi’s of the 2006 Internet video gold rush. Back in 1849, they supplied blue jeans rather than mining gold. We’re supplying a tool for the video sites, not the video itself.
Joshua - Great stuff. Very cool idea. Now, can you have this to market before the 2006 football season?
seems like the best thing to do is buy adobe stock to ride this trend
I did just that about four months ago… ; )
There’s not too much technology here, just creating timeline-based text sniplets.
the ability for the creator and those who watch the video to add annotations anywhere in the stream, and others later to click on those annotations and jump right to that point in the video.
///what does it mean “add annotations anywher ein the stream”
It means, “add annotations to the video at any point in time”. In other words, the annotation is attached to an interval in the time of the video. The interval has an in and out point (i.e. beginning and end).
Does this make sense?
This place looks good. Nice branding and technology.
However the website was quite different and strange to use (a bit clunky) and also I was having serious performance issues on the video. I have 24mbit and the connection is idle except for click.tv and the video was chopping every half second. Maybe they should look and handling performance a bit better.
I checked out the site. This thing has a ton of bugs and will need alot of work. It wont actually be any fun to use for about a year, and even then there is a ton of things it will need. For example ‘Real-Time Access’. I was pretty bored at the sight and didn’t see anything really unique. But that is only my opinion. I just thought I would offer it, since the comments seem to be full of nodding heads.
actually french (but with european coverage) http://www.dailymotion.com/ does commenting on video, even if it’s a videoblog and not more. also: not using macromedia, but they do have a wonderful service of automatic conversion of videos from one format to another