Football-loving couch potatoes rejoice: here's a new way for you to get your NFL fix on during the tragically long off-season. SI.com, the online arm of Sports Illustrated, will be launching a new video portal, NFL Draft FilmRoom, so that you'll have access to video highlights of each of the college football players who have been selected to the NFL's 2007 draft. (If you're not a football fan, FYI, this is a huge deal.)
The picks for the '07 NFL Draft will be announced on April 28 and 29 in NYC.
NFL Draft '07's FilmRoom
(Credit: Gotuit Media)The power behind this portal is Gotuit Media, a video start-up that specializes in metadata "deep-tagging" so that it's easier to search for content within videos. SI FilmRoom won't have the user-generated deep-tagging features found in Gotuit's SceneMaker offering, which is a bit of a shame, because it'd be cool to see what happens when that kind of technology is offered to sports fans eager to dissect the draft picks. But you'll still be able to search and check out the players' college career highlights in an impressive level of depth: you can select by name, school, position, NFL team, mock draft order, or actual draft order. In addition, you can use the embedded "deep-tags" to jump to particular spots in videos that highlight touchdowns, sacks, catches, interceptions, and all kinds of other football moves. Presumably, this will all be accessible shortly after draft picks are announced.
And in case you're a revenue-model geek: it's supported by pre-roll and mid-roll advertising.
(Credit:
Gotuit Media)
You know what I'm talking about. It's not your favorite YouTube video, but it would be if it were shorter, because it's got one hilarious moment bogged down in nine minutes of dumb commentary and bumping the camera around. Some people say that's what you've got to deal with when it comes to user-generated amateur video. But it doesn't have to be that way, according to Boston-based broadband video start-up Gotuit Media. It launched a new Web tool today that's hoping to make online video content more, well, adaptable.
Until this point, Gotuit has focused more on corporate new-media tools. Founded in 2000, the company has since inked partnerships with companies like Time Warner Cable and Comcast to help with broadband video-on-demand technology. Then, last July, Gotuit dipped a toe in the consumer-content market by launching its own broadband video portal: it now has channels for music videos, news, entertainment, weather, and sports.
But now, it's trying something totally new: what executives Patrick Donovan and Mark Pascarella, whom I met with a few weeks ago, call "deep tagging." Gotuit today launched a tool called SceneMaker, which allows you to tweak videos found on YouTube and Metacafe, annotating them with intra-video tags (i.e. "Here's where the cat falls off the TV" at 3 minutes, 17 seconds) for other Gotuit users, and bookmarking clips within videos so that you only have to e-mail and share the good part. Hence, you can pick out your favorite joke in that "Saturday Night Live" sketch, or the best play in that NFL game clip, or what-have-you. There's a Firefox toolbar, too, so you can always have access to SceneMaker's functions.
Now I'm going to pose a question to all you lovely Webware readers: Is "deep tagging" too much? It's cool, sure. But will it catch on? Try it out and let us know what you think!
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