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Coull.tv and The Holy Grail of Searching Within Videos

Written by Richard MacManus / December 6, 2006 12:39 PM / 10 Comments

Online video sharing sites are a dime a dozen these days, but a newly launched one caught my eye this week. Coull.tv promises to enable users to search inside videos - to find specific segments within a video that they want to view - as well as interact with "moving objects" inside the video. You may remember that Gotuit does a similar thing, by manually inserting metadata within videos. I'm tracking their progress too, so I thought I'd also investigate coull.tv's system. Note that Gotuit is focused on 'professional' content, while coull.tv is a YouTube-like consumer play on amateur videos.

The key differentiator with coull.tv (from the likes of YouTube) is that it allows users to search for specific moments within video - as well as click on and interact with what the company calls "moving objects" during play. The latter is done via a downloadable app called ‘video activator’, which enables users to make objects within a video interactive. Using this app, objects within the video can be edited by the coull.tv community - with the aim of making video searching more contextual and relevant. So this in turn enables viewers to find specific points in a video and perhaps send specific links within a video to friends.


Video Activator in action

As a complement to all this, coull.tv has something called a "density bar", which highlights community tagging, commenting and other activity - and indicates when interactive elements are upcoming during play.

A version for brands and marketers

There is also a version of the coull.tv system that enables brands and marketers to insert clickable objects within a video and link directly to brand micro-sites or product pages. This is an interesting idea, given Read/WriteWeb's recent coverage of brands utilizing social networking sites like YouTube, in order to promote their products and marketing campaigns. Coull.tv is actually embracing this trend, unlike Flickr for example which is discouraging it. The branded version of coull.tv will be known as branded channels.

As Adrants pointed out, most consumer users of coull.tv may not take the time to insert metadata inside a video using 'video activator' - but brands are much more likely to do that, because there's specific payoff for them.

More on searching objects within a video

We asked the company how coull.tv is different to Gotuit. The reply was that Gotuit provides the user with a playlist, enabling the user to jump from clip to clip. But we were told that Coull.tv provides more than clip jumping - it also has "the ability to define and follow objects within a video, tag them, comment on them, search them etc." So instead of a clip playlist, coull.tv aims to provide an 'object playlist' (my wording).

The company told us their aim is to make videos "reactive to viewers in the same way links react on a web page." In other words, objects within a video can be linked in the same way as text can be linked on a webpage. I think this is a great idea, although I believe Gotuit (and no doubt others) are also working on such a system too.

Summary

Searching within videos is probably the holy grail of online video - e.g. wouldn't Google love to have this feature in YouTube, so it can put contextual advertising within videos. I think coull.tv is a great start and the only big drawback I see is that it requires users to manually input the metadata, using Video Activator. While brands and marketers have a clear incentive to do this, will normal users? Gotuit has the same issue, that metadata has to be manually input.

What are your thoughts on coull.tv and searching inside videos in general?



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  1. There's a particular realm in which I desperately need searchable videos-- music videos. Sometimes I see a music video, and I remember visual aspects of that music video - a piano, a ball of thread, etc. I've sometimes spent hours searching for videos that I forgot the name of, and find myself quite frustrated that noone's described the visuals of the video anywhere. (Probably due to it being a not-as-celebrated artistic medium).
    If music videos could get heavily tagged up, I could find what I wanted. The unfortunate thing is, as you said, it requires a lot of user interaction. Some smart company could augment a system with suggested tagging and ability to recognize objects.

    Posted by: Pamela Fox | December 6, 2006 6:11 PM



  2. this would be great if it were cross referenced

    for example a search would produce only the brief clips of the subject

    I could see in the future, tagging of physical world hyperlinks embedded automatically into the media for cataloging

    .raw records the exposure, lens type and other info, it would be an extension into the actual image

    Posted by: Andrew M | December 6, 2006 8:52 PM



  3. Take a look also at veotag (http://www.veotag.com). They also allow manual tagging of videos to allow for deep linking and searching (the tags show up in Google searches).

    Posted by: Iain | December 7, 2006 8:42 AM



  4. Wrong comment on this, sorry...

    What I want to say is, this service is cool, I mean Tagging

    Posted by: Denver Wang | December 7, 2006 10:41 AM



  5. 1) Coull.tv is currently MS Winows technology only (ie. won't work for mac & linux browsers, even Firefox).

    2) The ability to manipulate or interact with objects inside video is an MPEG-4 feature, specifically BIFS (Binary format for Scenes) which was included when VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) was absorbed into the MPEG-4 specification. BIFS (also called Scene description and Application engine) is MPEG-4 part 11.

    3) Move along folks, nothing new to see here: I was doing stuff like this with VRML back in 1996-1997.

    Posted by: old school developer | December 7, 2006 2:18 PM



  6. osd, as usual you raise some excellent points. Just wondering if you know of any other online video sites that are attempting this 'search inside the video' problem - and if so, any recommendations for me to check out? Be keen to tap your brain on that...

    Posted by: Richard MacManus | December 7, 2006 2:41 PM



  7. Richard,

    Just sent you an e-mail with a starter list of web sites. :)

    Posted by: old school developer | December 8, 2006 12:39 AM



  8. osd, interesting perspective on our launch offering. offering for linux, firefox etc coming very soon. There is one thing being able to add interactivity as an 'old school developer' quite another to do the same as a 14yr school kid.
    we can add same functionality in MPEG2,1, 4, Real, Flash
    coull.tv 2006 is just the start

    cheers
    Irfon
    CEO
    coull.tv

    Posted by: Irfon Watkins | December 8, 2006 5:38 AM



  9. Irfon,

    The coull.tv opportunity sounds interesting/exciting if, in fact, you can make it easy for a 14 yr. old kid to add interactivity. However, most of the 14 yr. olds that I know can kick my a-- on consumer level video desktop tools :)

    The real test will be if my sister-in-law can add interactivity to the endless set of videos I receive of my 3 year old niece ;)

    By the way, the MPEG-4 interactivity features are portable to other MPEG specs, again nothing new there. SMIL was also absorbed into the MPEG-4 spec, and Real has always had the definitive implementation of SMIL (1.0 & 2.0); so I expect Real integration to be relatively straightforward. Flash can be used as a container for pretty much any type of digital media without losing the inherent properties of the source media file, so again relatively straightforward integration -- until Apollo rolls out.

    Question: Have you had a chance to look at IBM's video authoring toolset? IBM contributed XMT and FlexTime as well as heavyweight contributions for SMIL 2.0 to the MPEG-4 spec.

    Cheers!

    Posted by: old school developer | December 9, 2006 10:43 PM



  10. osd, love your comments, very amusing!
    Irfon

    Posted by: Irfon | December 10, 2006 8:43 AM




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