Asterpix, a video tagging service we looked at late last year is launching some exciting new technology later this month. It's a new automated tagging service that will go through any video you plug in and use its recognition algorithms to tag and link whatever's in your video to informational resources about it on the Web.
In its current state, the service lets you accomplish a similar feat, adding text and URL links to various objects--although the process is manual. On the 17th, users will simply be able to run videos from many major hosting services through Asterpix's tagging bot and have tags created automatically before adding their own.
Find out more about video clips using Asterpix's upcoming auto-tagging service.
(Credit: CNET Networks)The Asterbot has already been doing this to several thousand videos a day and making the entire index of robot-created tags searchable alongside those made by humans. Video tags can pull up information from all over the Web. In one case I was watching a clip from Cheech and Chong, and there was a timed tag that had automatically been inserted with an anecdote about a certain part of the scene. That anecdote had come from IMDB, although the creators tell me information can come from less well-known sources as long as it's been indexed in major search engines.
The actual process of machine-tagging involves pulling in imaging data from the video clip and matching it up to whatever text was included by the video's creator. Nat Kausik, CEO of Asterpix tells me the process is a little similar to Google's search algorithm in creating relevancy based on what bits of parts of the video get the most screen time. For example, in a video of a someone walking through a grocery store there would be a wealth of information about other products and people, but if you're focused on that one person for the majority of the clip the engine will pick on it and react accordingly.
While there are no ads inserted into Asterpix-tagged videos yet, Kasuik says it's clearly a direction the company is going in. Contextual video advertising is already in action from Google, and is under development from over a dozen other companies. In the meantime, Asterpix's next move is a widget for video publishers that will do some of the tagging at the point of upload.
Up until this afternoon I had never heard of the expression "hypervideo," although I was quite familiar with the concept having used it in video services like Viddler, and enhanced podcasts in Windows Media Player. The idea is simple--take hyperlinks and textual information, and add it to various times or positions on a video. The result is that your viewers can have added contextual information about whatever they're watching, at the moment it happens.
The hard part is the execution, and making things user-friendly. A service called Asterpix has taken a stab at it with a hypervideo service that lets users build their own link-infested videos, complete with visual cues that tell you when you can access the added URLs and notes. While watching a video that's been enhanced on Asterpix, you won't notice much besides a small glowing circle that will show up on a person or object, and track them as they move. When you mouseover the notification, the video will pause, and you'll get a little page full of whatever text or links users have added to the video.
The actual process of adding these links takes two-steps. The first is picking the video you want to annotate. This is managed through the integrated search tool, which will scour YouTube, Google, MySpace, Brightcove and MTV to let you find whatever you'd looking for. Unfortunately you can't just plug in a video URL from one of these services, but if you know the title, you're good to go. The second step involves maneuvering a box around any object in the video clip and adding a description, URL, and tags. To do this, you simply need to highlight the object with a box. The service will do its best to track the object you've tagged, which it managea to do really well with on clips where there aren't quick cutaways.
The end result is a video experience that is slightly disjointed due to starting and stopping videos, coupled with various flashing indicators that pop up on the screen. If you're just in it to watch the video, you can turn the notes off, or click the link to watch the video on its original site. Also, if you're trying to avoid the flashing indicators altogether, there's a index on the left that shows all the notes for the entire clip. Clicking any of them will jump you right to the spot, complete with annotation.
I actually prefer Viddler's approach to this entire concept with their timed tags and comments, which are visually separated into two groups by color. The only downside with that system is that you can't call action to what's going on in certain part of the screen, and with more than 30 or 40 comments on a short video, things get a little hectic. However, when you scale Asterpix's approach to visual tagging, the entire screen will be covered in little pulsing indicators--not exactly viewer-friendly.
For other solutions that do visual video annotation with existing videos, see BubblePly and the currently defunct Click.TV.
Tag people or objects in a video with Asterpix. In this case, we're annotating Erica Ogg's face for the sake of identification.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
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