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 and does a good job sending new stuff my way. But I can’t pick a song and play it at will like I can with videos on Gotuit. If Gotuit can work out a deal with the record labels to allow plays on demand, why can’t Pandora?
2,000 songs isn’t very much. My 5 year old MP3 player holds about that.
I doubt this is going to kill MTV and the associated jukebox channels, any more than Pandora has killed radio stations.
Do people really care how fast the movies load, so long as they load? I assume this is in part due to 0 latency on an empty site. If it gets busier, it will slow down.
really i am not sure what Mike is pumping up here… another hot air balloon?
James, did you try the service? Try it first. It’s cool.
On the depth of the music library, iTunes only claims to have 3000+, so Gotuit isn’t doing that badly given they just launched. The execs I spoke to said they are in the process of making more available that they already have under contract.
I love the way this plays video – its so quick, makes it very satisfying to use. The one thing that annoys me about other video services is waiting for streaming. Not sure about the name though and needs more content
I don’t know how you’re saying it loads up so quick, I just had the most irritating experience trying to stream The Killers’ video, Somebody Told Me. Pandora, Last.fm and YouTube all work beautifully and fast on my broadband connection, but this was stuttering and messing up the song.
Nonetheless, the idea is what matters and I think this is one company, that’s got it right. I don’t mind watching video online, like on YouTube or Google Video. There are just two things, that a site which is serving streaming, Flash content should keep in mind. Number one, I’m not going to wait around forever till it loads or watch video, that stops or stutters. Number two, I do not want to see advertisements during the video (before is OK, after is preferable). Gotuit should consider Akamai or something.
And Mike, digg this.
It looks great!
Straight off, my thoughts on the interface, it’s nice, clean, intuitive, and most importantly, simple enough not to be cluttered and allowing you to find what you want, quickly (large, clean buttons).
Regarding point two – it does indeed load very quickly, so fast there isn’t even a pre-loader bar or anything!
With 2000+ videos upon launch, that seems like a feat in itself, iTMS itself apparently started with several thousand.. and you have to pay for those.
Just a note, it appears that an ad plays every X minutes, or at least, when you leave the player idle for a short while. At least it doesn’t play automatically in between/before/after every single video you watch unlike some other ‘free’ video services.
Neat, Categorized, this one’s a keeper. Shall recommend to friends.
Thanks for putting this on Digg Simran. I appreciate it as always.
It’s all my pleasure!
To my question, do you have any idea why it’s so slow on my connection in comparison to Pandora, Last.fm and YouTube all loading much quicker?
Perhaps because you are in India? Works fine here.
It might be that. Rhapsody and Pandora, when it first started didn’t allow you to stream in countries outside the US. Rhapsody still doesn’t, but I’ve been using Pandora for a while now.
Tells me it requires flash player and that they’ll wait while I download it. I have flash player installed, but it doesn’t say which version is required. I’m on Linux, so I assume it wants flash 8 or 9, which isn’t available for Linux. Oh well.
the streams timed out 99% of the time, before they even started playing, i dont see how this is much better than any other music video site such as yahoo or aol, only things to bring over visitors would be speed and selection, otherwise most of the stuff i saw there was pretty old.
Online services such as Gotuit really does threaten the relevance and existence of Television. However, TV still outruns online videos by about a mile. While the thought of being able to watch your favorite shows at the time of your choice entices people to turn their backs on TV and glue their eyes on their computer LCDs, the poor picture quality of online videos are still driving people back to their television sets. Like the author, I also wonder how the site manages to deliver videos at great speeds. Usually this is done by reducing file size. However, the usual consequence of file size reduction is picture depreciation. Nevertheless, sites such as Gotuit will certainly pave the way for the eventual demise of Television sometime in the future.
Cool. A lot of work to do partnerships vs. user-generated, but the benefits are numerous. It feels like this is what launch.com should be.
http://www.gotu...0&s=1196898
Just out of curiousity, is http://www.insu...anceandnews.com (odd URL but “1500 80s Videos”) have illegal content on it or is it relatively cheap now to license all of this content?
You’re absolutely right about the quick load. It’s also nice to see a site launch with a decent amount of “current” content. I can see myself using this a lot.
The streaming seems to be powered by Adobe’s awesome Flash Media Server technology, which would explain why videos launch so fast.
http://www.adob...ashmediaserver/
What is Entertaninment?
Erm, should they not have checked the spelling and graphical errors first?
Compare to Youtube, Metacafe and Pandora the video on Gotuit is streaming terrible on my broadband
As you say, feels satisfying to use due to the short loading times and easy navigation. soj, timeout problems might be due to your network connection, as it works fine also here in UK, although I have a ridiculously fast connection anyway.
I agree, takes a step towards the on-demand no-hassle tv-content-on-computer model that attracts people like me who don’t like to pay licence fees for the endless bigbrother-type of sludge that dominates tv these days.
The more you use their site the more ads you have to watch. Sorry, but that’s no way to attract an audience. Users are not going to maintain attention on a site that makes you sit through a 15 second vid ad EVERY time you click b/w vids. Especially when they’ve been conditioned not to see any ads on YouTube et al. The percentage of folks that browse vids and do not watch a full clip is huge. Especially on a new site where they don’t know what things are and where to find them. What an awful user experience. They’ll never get traction with this ad model.
Are you sure they didn’t just skin the Brightcove player? There is all this Reuters news on there, and I thought they had a deal with Brightcove, and this is Brightcove’s model, and these guys are based in Boston. I’d check on that. Immediate start of playback is cool, but a lot of the videos stopped in the middle to buffer, and resolution was not so good.
i even can not load page somehow. it is total blank. maybe it is firewall issue, but i still feel that it is site problem.
Why can’t Pandora (or anyone else) get a licensing deal for on-demand audio? Well, their current service follows the DMCA provisions that qualify it for a statutory license, meaning they pay a pre-set rate and don’t need individual deals with labels. Once you start talking about on-demand, you need to do individual licensing deals. That’s a major undertaking. They certainly could get on-demand audio deals, but they’d be on the same terms as Napster, Rhapsody et al, which means forget about a free service with this functionality.
The fact that the labels allow on-demand free video is irrelevant. Irrational though it may be, the labels look at video as advertising and audio as “product”. It would be a major sea change for them to change their view on this.
I just tried it on 3 browsers across 4 computers in two locations. So far, it will not even load. Maybe they are getting hammered right now, but this does not bode well for them, at least as far as my interest in trying again.
gotoit statrted off selling their tagging and indexing software to cable operators and VOD server systems to make cable VOD a better experience. I think they’ve trialed on a Time Warner system. It’s a feature for a VOD experience, not a business. In my opinion it looks like they realized that, and tired of waiting for cable operators to deploy new technology, especially those not ad revenue supported, GoToit decided to place that content online, instead. My guess is that since their roots are not in content presentation, or being a network, that GoToit will not survive the long haul.
But I give them credit for their attempt at two important things – better content than a guy getting hit in the groin – which will never garner ad dollars and thus become a real distributor of quality video in the sense of a cable or TV distributor (a similar potential ad problem for social networks) – and an ad supported business model for content owners. After all, high quality content creation depends on ads or subscription. Thus, so does a migration of great content onto non-TV platforms.
io amo sempre di piu le canzoni melodiche
Yeah, I’m looking forward to television’s demise. I mean, who wants to watch the Super Bowl on a 60-inch HDTV when I can be sooo Bleeding Edge 2.0 and watch music and viral videos on a little computer or cell phone screen.
I hope they have that Saturday Night Live skit that mentioned Google Maps, haha funniest skit evar because they mentioned Google Maps it’s like SNL 2.0 ROFLCOPTER!!!
I think youtube should adopt some of the features (indexing, tagging in depth, speed) and spruce up their design a little bit. I think this is a great product and great implementation
All I have to say wow. Its like those services in MCE only better and no annoying ads as much as the ones in MCE
the commercials before the videos are fast.
the videos themselves have the same problems as all the other services… buffering…