Radical transformation of Video Search

Back in May Google switched on their Univeral Search with a subtle change in the positioning of their Search navigation bar. However this is not the big hidden news for video search. I believe that a radical transformation in search has occured. The product that creates this situation is VeoTag. Veotag enables the creation of searchable time stamps for video. It supports a number of video formats and allows you to jump to the time stamp in the media file.

Just think on that for a minute... Searchable time stamps. Jump to a portion of the media file. This means that portions of a video can be indexed in Google's ever expanding search database.

I haven't had opportunity to play with Veotag personally. One feature I want to check out is whether it is possible to tag multimedia content that is hosted elsewhere. If this is the case then the growth of Veotag could be enormous. With the proper social hooks anybody could index and multimedia file. The days of ripping off portions of tv shows and uploading to YouTube becomes just a quaint idea. Instead fans of TV shows could veotag the original source on the copyright holders sight and index the exact portion of the file they want to highlight.

Video content suddenly becomes searchable. The richness of this capability goes way beyond file tagging.The technology can also be applied to audio files. Suddenly there is potential to tag the best ring tone loop from an original piece of music.

If Veotag can embrace the wisdom and the passion of the crowds, without violating copyright for content then this is a real, ground breaking, transformational change. Veotag becomes a must have component for any of the major video services such as YouTube or AOL Uncut Video. Will Veotag stay open or will it be snapped up by one of the established players that might want to keep the technology to itself to provide an edge in the marketplace. The real benefit from veotag comes about if it unleashes the power of the community.

Veotag has other traits of great web 2.0 software. It provides direct benefit to the user, by allowing a video producer to create searchable time stamps for their movie. This works in the professional space in preparing for web distribution and works in the consumer space by allowing a parent to identify the people involved in the home movie. So instead of having to sit through an hour long home movie yo could instead skip to the 15 second portion that had the event that was of real interest to the viewer.

Video and music has an avid fan base and this technology provides the potential for passionate fans to enrich the content they are most interested.

The fact that the tags are searchable provides an even greater opportunity to deliver highly targetted ads to video and audio viewers. a lexical analysis of video time tags allows more accurate mapping to content. Just Think a video of a conference could provide links to purchase a specific paper referenced in a presentation - at the point it is referenced. The potential is endless. Additionally, the more this technolgiy is adopted, the richer and more valuable the time stamp index becomes.

Veotag is definitely a player to watch in the video sector. I have tried using the service and experienced some .Net server errors. While the demo works across platforms, it seems that the upload process may be more Windows friendly since it seems to require an ActiveX plugin to be present. What are your thoughts on this new service? If you have an account and have had an opportunity to use Veotag then do our community a favour and let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment below.