Gotuit will launch a social video tagging service on Tuesday that allows users to cut and tag any online video from any source. Gotuit is a video host for online video, mobile video, and cable TV. But unless you’re YouTube, you can’t compete in online video without a new bag of tricks. Contextual cutting and tagging is Gotuit ‘s new trick.
“We are launching [this] to give the power of tagging video to the community,” said Gotuit president Mark Pascarella. “So you can take the best parts of a video and tag inside the file.”
Gotuit gave TechCrunch a demo last Friday and showed how users can take any online video from any source and use their Web application to work with it. There is no application to download. It reminded me a lot of Podzinger, a podcast tagging application, except Podzinger is not human-powered like SceneMaker. SceneMaker tags come from human insight, not speech or video recognition.
Once you are in SceneMaker, you can upload an existing Web video from its URL. When the video starts playing in SceneMaker, users can click the progress bar to stop it at any time and create pieces of the video that are assigned separate tags and descriptions. Each piece of the video then gets its own embed code and URL. With the embed code, users can republish the video wherever they’d like. With the URL, they can email, IM, or share however they see fit.
Once videos have been edited in SceneMaker, each Gotuit URL/embed code will re-direct users back to the video’s place of origin where it will play just the tagged version. In this way, users who watch the tagged portion don’t know that they are only watching a portion of the original because the video itself has not been altered. Pascarella said that this will help users cut through the hours and hours of useless content to “get to the good stuff.”
“There is just so much content and too many videos out there right now,” he said. “The explosion of content requires better navigation. We’re not promoting that existing video be altered. We just want to give users the ability to flush out what interests them.”
Gotuit has six patents on this technology, which they began petitioning for in 1996.
“We always knew online video would be big and our vision was always that video should be a personalized expression,” Pascarella said.