IT’S A BETTER ON-LINE and VOD video search. The user interface is slicker. The content is professional, not user-generated. And not only can users demand a video, they can demand to go right to a certain spot in a video.
Last week Gotuit Media launched Gotuit.com, which features Gotuit’s patented search and navigation technology that tucks away the loading, buffering, and waiting to watch videos online. It’s gone. You don’t see it. (Ed note: I saw a preview in action in Boston during CTAM. It’s pretty nifty).
Gotuit viewers enjoy seamless navigation between videos and an intuitive layout that gets them to the good stuff – instantly. Wanna see the goal – go right to it. Just the slam-bang finale of a movie? One click.
At no cost to users, Gotuit.com features an extensive library of professional content covering music, news, sports and entertainment.
Visitors to Gotuit can view programmed playlists, create their own playlists or share videos from leading content providers such as Universal Music, Reuters, Associated Press, AccuWeather, Planet X and others. Gotuit also offers Hollywood trailers, celebrity news, and a vast collection of short films within its Entertainment category.
Has a company with a strong video background in the video on demand space with U.S. MSOs, become just another of the slew of companies offering video on demand on broadband? Maybe. But its offering has several key differences. It’s more organized, and it’s all professional content.
While in Boston at CTAM, Gotuit president Mark Pascarella sat down with Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien. What follows is an edited transcript.
Greg O’Brien: We ran a story last week where (HDNet CEO) Mark Cuban said basically there’s no future in broadband video. I’d be very curious to hear your response to that, first off.
Mark Pascarella: My reaction is we think there is a very bright future in broadband video. As you look at the marketplace, I would not submit the broadband video experience is necessarily today a replacement for TV viewing – but it’s certainly a new and differentiated platform that allows for a new and differentiated viewing experience. And so we’re big believers at Gotuit in the idea that video will be accessed in many different forms on many different platforms, many different means. But each one of those will deliver its own unique experience that has value to the viewing audience whether it’s in a living room environment as I’m sure Mark Cuban would support, with a HD display, or not.
GOB: Sure. You’ve got to look at where he’s coming from
MP: We also believe that broadband video has a real set of advantages that, while not replacing, can interestingly complement the center of the living room and then even extending beyond to mobile video. It’s about convenience and giving the consumer control over the viewing experience in a way that lets them really decide precisely what they want to see.
GOB: I don’t agree with him. I have a Slingbox, which is a kind of broadband video and it’s not broadcast quality but I watch it all the time… to say that one way is wrong, one way is right, or one way is going to be dead or whatever, I don’t see how there’s any way to predict that right now.
MP: Consumers’ habits are changing towards more control, more choice, more engagement with the media, and to gravitate towards those devices that make it available and easy to consume content on the consumer’s terms.
GOB: So when I think of where you’re coming from and I look at all the types of video you can get online, like at YouTube of course, I find navigating through all these videos to get something I want very, very difficult.
MP: I would agree.
GOB: So is what you’re bringing to market, a better search? More than that? How does Gotuit.com work?
MP: What we’re doing is to leverage our experience in on-demand products across all platforms. The company was actually founded back in 2000 and we are coming at this from a deep and rich television video history. Today we have proven products and proven technology – we’re deployed on the video on-demand platform with Time Warner and Adelphia. We’ve seen nearly a million homes throughout New England, western New York, western Pennsylvania, and parts of Ohio , and in every one of the markets where Gotuit has been deployed, it is the number one video on-demand destination.
So on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis, Gotuit draws more plays or views than HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, CNN, you name the provider. And that’s less about the content that we’ve acquired, more about the experience, where we’ve allowed the consumer to get precise access to the content they’re most interested in seeing.
We now have almost a dozen issued patents around the idea of using metadata to index, search, navigate, and manage stored media… we’re creating an entirely new set of data that describes with great detail and granularity each element of a video file which allows the consumer to navigate precisely to that point in a file he wants to see.
GOB: But when you’re generating that data and you’re guiding people’s specific parts in the story, I mean do people physically have to watch all of the shows and tag them or…
MP: It’s both highly automated and there’s human oversight… what we didn’t do was to leave it all to artificial intelligence. What we found was that while AI was quite good – 90% accurate, sometimes even better – if one out of 10 times the consumer clicks thinking that they’re going to the touchdown and it’s not, or the news story and it starts 14 or 15 seconds too soon, it doesn’t work.
So to get absolute precision, we built a tool set that would let a non-video editor create that data set very, very efficiently.
GOB: From my own consumer point of view, I’ve got regular video demand service from my cable provider but the number one thing that would make me use it more would be if it was easier to navigate. How is your system going to address that issue?
MP: If you look at the key differentiators that we bring to the marketplace, we’re coming from a deep and rich history in television and bringing it into broadband or the web, whereas so many of the people on the web today are web-centric and they’re pulling video into their site. I think that makes a big difference in how the products are designed, and what the end experience feels like to the user. Our experience feels very much like a TV/web hybrid where you’ve got the ability to sit back and watch without interruption, with the ability to use the very best of the web in terms of search and navigation to get what you want.
The rights that we’ve acquired are in four key categories: music, sports, news and entertainment; and in each one of those categories we’ve created and are now delivering broadband video products. But we also deliver those in on-demand (to the TV) and we’ll be delivering those in mobile as well…
We would suggest that ours is a dramatically better user experience – where the consumer can get directly to the desired video segment, with instant access to what’s inside the file that the consumer might be most interested in… And it’s always an immersive video experience, it keeps them entirely engaged in the video itself. So they’re never forced into a situation where they need to go through the connecting, loading, buffering and so on.
Then they can use playlists to navigate, but we’ve taken that experience and combined it with what we believe to be a very compelling business model where the playlisting also creates new advertising inventory that can be more highly targeted.
If I can take you to what you’d like to see most you’d probably stick around and watch more, so that expendable consumption concept is something that we’ve seen prove itself out in the on-demand platform through longer session times, and we expect in broadband video the reduction of connecting, loading, waiting, buffering will enable us to deliver longer session time.
GOB: Let’s go back to what you mentioned about advertising. What’s the advantage for the advertiser?
MP: In each of those four categories we suggested a way that is more highly targeted – and they place their ad against professional content. And we’re doing that across platform.
GOB: Now are the consumers still able to skip through if they wish to bypass ads?
MP: The 15 second ads they cannot skip away from, but the ads are introduced in a way that we believe is unobtrusive and certainly more relevant than simply placing a pre-roll in front of each ad.
What we tried to do – and this may speak specifically to your question about YouTube and where we fit – is to launch the product exclusively with professional content. There is no user-contributed content to wrap that inside what we believe is a superior, engaging viewing experience – to really give the consumer what may be best thought of as the power of the executive producer.
You as the consumer could determine what stories, what order, what length, and really take control of the viewing experience. And so it’s that pairing that goes with technology, the premium content that we think that for this launch — really differentiates the overall offer.
We know that consumer habits have changed and there really is this – whether it’s the DVDs or game consoles or on-demand or the Internet itself – it’s changing consumer expectation that they will have control over the media experience and that’s matched with now 70-plus-% of consumers having access to broadband video and using that to surf rich media.
And now the dollars are there as advertising moves away from broadcast cable to the online and in particular, online video markets.
GOB: The one thing I always think is inaccurate about consumer opinion is that they – or we – want everything, always. Nobody wants that. It’s too much. I think the majority want to have it edited up so that they can easily find things that they want. Having everything in front of you makes what you like too hard to find.
MP: That’s at the heart of our product offering – to organize and present content in a way that makes it easy for the consumer. People want to have choice and control, but they don’t want to have to work real hard.
GOB: Exactly. That’s a good way to say it
MP: We come at the world of broadband video trying to answer a very different question, so if you look at the content owners or cable operators, distributors, tool providers, portals, etc. – all these people focused on broadband video are focused against a single goal of how do we get content online? How do we make content available via broadband?
We come at the world from a different viewpoint which is to say how do we help the consumer make sense of it? How do you organize and present video content for broadband in a way that makes it really easy for the viewer to get what they want? We think by answering a different question we’ve created a whole new set of products and opportunity for consumers.
