Metadata: Unlock the potential of Internet video
Feb 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Sam Vasisht and Patrick Donovan
- Chapterization, skip and search When Fox Reality decided to broadcast its Fox Reality Really Awards show on the Web, it indexed the entire awards show in segments so that users could watch sections that were of interest to them. Through metadata, users can skip to sections based by award, show, presenter, musician and so on, as well as create playlists and watch them in linear fashion.
- Dynamic programming and multiple navigational paths Sports Illustrated uses metadata to create dynamic programming for sports fans through its FilmRooms video portals. Users can navigate through multiple paths to view highlights, which are updated as the games progress and rankings change. Users can search by team, player, position and more to create their own highlight clips that can be shared with others and posted on user Web sites and blogs.
- Mashups, personalization and sharing Lifetime uses metadata to allow users to define their own virtual scenes within a video program. These scenes can be shared with others and concatenated to create user-defined playlists (mashups).
- Reorganize and collaboration Carleton University uses video on demand to create lectures that students can tailor to their needs through indexing parts of video lectures and reorganizing them to their individual requirements. At the same time, student notes and annotations make the videos searchable by other students.
Low production costs
Figure 2. There are two ways to author metadata. High-quality metadata is human authored as opposed to automated.
Click to enlarge
One of the underlying questions is the cost of authoring metadata and whether one approach is more cost-effective than another. (See Figure 2.) This boils down to the question of quality versus quantity. If accuracy and premium end-user experience is secondary to processing large volumes of video for a basic search index, then automation is likely to help solve the problem better than a human. Automation, such as scene change and speech to text, serves well in the production stage of video because there is a lot of raw footage, and the people handling the video are professionals. Their task is to manage the video production, not to consume or monetize the video.
The cost of human-authored metadata is not only less than automated metadata, but it is also insignificant relative to the overall video production costs. Human metadata authoring can typically be accomplished in much less time than the duration of the video. People don't have to be trained to recognize speech or images like machines do, reducing upfront investment of time and resources. Lastly, human authored metadata allows for further human creativity and reasoning to be applied to video programming, bringing new elements of creativity to an already creative process with negligible incremental costs.
Conclusions
Metadata is a critical element to the success of video on the Internet. Publishers need to address metadata creation as an essential part of the video production workflow.
Publishers need to incorporate systems that author and manage metadata toward these objectives as they look to build audiences and advertising with their Internet video strategies.
Sam Vasisht is founder of 2/1 TechMedia and Patrick Donovan is vice president and general manager at Gotuit.
| Video search (asset level) |
| Video search (scene level) |
| Seek and skip functions |
| Video packaging and presentation |
| Playlisting |
| Dynamic program updates |
| Multiple navigation paths within or across videos |
| Mashups/remixes |
| Advertising (in-stream, overlay, banner) |
| Personalization and targeting |
| Sharing and social networking |
| Reporting and analytics |
| Recommendations |
Figure 1. Metadata-based applications allow the inherent value of video to be unlocked and monetized on the Internet.
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