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Viodi View Newsletter - November 29th, 2006

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Where's the Value - Content or Metadata?

By Ken Pyle
ken.pyle at viodi.com

Mystery Science Theater meets the Internet - that's one way to describe the Flash player from ClickTV. ClickTV is based on the premise that user-generated meta-data will become as or more important as user-generated content. Essentially, they are creating value by allowing just about anyone to become a pop culture, technology or political commentator.

What makes ClickTV different is that it is not a video sharing or serving site. Through dissemeniation of their Flash players, they are creating a network of comments about content. The ClickTV Flash Player is intended as a way for a community to interact with a given video. This meta-data allows search within the video. Built into the player is a way for viewers to add their comments to a video (comments can also be linked to other documents). The cool thing about this is that the comments stay with the video, regardless of wherever the video is embedded.

Compact Mode

I added some supplemental information to an earlier video (above) to see how well it works.

There is an embedded search function that can be found by rolling the cursor over the video. There are also a bunch of little dots that overlay onto the video. Those dots represent a timeline of comments. The viewer doesn't have to wait for the video to download in order to jump to any point in the video, which is amazing considering a streaming media server is not required.

Besides the virtual communities, this could be an interesting tool for critiquing videos or providing supplemental information to a presentation that has already been produced.

The above video is in what ClickTV calls "Comact Mode". Comments regarding the video are overlaid onto the video. in a text area outside the video part of the player. The user can change between full mode and compact mode.

Full Mode

In the "Full Mode", comments are placed outside the video part of the player. As with the "Compact Mode", the text appears when the particular index point in the video is reached.

ClickTV does not host the videos. The above videos are hosted on a shared http server. The performance is amazing considering the conditions. Converting it to an FLV format is a bit of a challenge. More about that in another article.

ClickTV is exploring how their service could be applied to a IPTV service. More features are promised. This service definitely points to an entire new category of UCG - User Generated Comments.

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The Video Business Case for Independent Telcos – The Report

Viodi’s report, Video Business Case provides results to a survey of independent telcos and their business case for video. Most of the telcos that responded to the survey have figured out a way to deploy video services. This survey provides insight from the independent telcos as well as several of their Engineering firms.

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Ken's comment - this person is a great find for any telco wanting to get in the cable business! Contact us at jobs at viodi.com to meet this person.