THE EXPLOSION OF VIDEO ON THE WEB RAISES NEW PROBLEMS, FRUSTRATES USERS

Video on the Web is Exploding

Widespread home access to broadband has (finally) given home users the ability to access video on the Web. In March 2006, 95.5 million U.S. homes had broadband access - up from 74.3 million a year earlier (in February 2005).

The numbers are astounding.

• MSN Video had 9.3 million unique visitors in February 2006, up 44% over the previous year.
• YouTube, the video sharing site, streams 30 million videos a day and receives 35,000 new video submissions every day.
• iFilm and Yahoo's video search engine each in the past year saw triple-digit, year-over-year growth in visitors to their sites.
• Dozens of free video-sharing businesses are coming online. Beyond YouTube, there's Vimeo, Google Video, Blip.TV and Revver.

More and more individuals are creating and posting their own videos to the Web (due to the rapidly decreasing costs, and ready availability, of video equipment like video-capable cell phones and cameras and low-cost editing software).

With Explosion, There's Also Mounting Frustration

Finding a desired video on the web is a hit-or-miss proposition.

• The technology employed by search engines when looking for video is no different than that used when looking for text: They both look for text (or 'metatext').
• Because most videos have very little metatext associated with them, search engines - and, hence, people hunting for the videos - either cannot find them, or do not know when they have.

Downloading and/or streaming countless videos to look for a specific video - or a specific scene within a video - can take forever.

Watching videos longer than two minutes or so can be painful, as it is difficult in a long video to fast forward (or rewind) to locate scenes of interest. The problem is getting more acute, as Web videos are getting longer.

Current search engine "solutions" for making videos easier to find, such as grouping them by general content or by popularity of download, are insufficient.

(Until now) there has been no real solution for finding specific content within a video; at best, video sharing sites offer a handful of screenshots from a video -

which is insufficient for searching through videos longer than a minute or two.

veotag (www.veotag.com), now in its beta phase, provides the solution. It enables video creators, amateur and professional, to create and "write" clickable text about  - i.e., to annotate in a clickable way - nearly any video on the Web. This means viewers know what's inside a video, and where. Most important, they can click to the portions they want to see, in any order they wish. "veotaggers" can share the enhanced video - clickable text and all - with anyone (or everyone) with Web access. The basic veotag service is free for consumer video "authors."

About veotag, Inc.

veotag, Inc. is a provider of resources and tools that help solve problems associated with video and audio on the Web. veotag allows video authors and sound file producers, amateur and professional, to tell audiences what's inside their videos and audio files and to search within those files by clicking on descriptive text. The company is located in New York City. For more information, see www.veotag.com.

Said Ben Ratliff, Jazz and Blues Critic at The New York Times about video on the web, "Part of that headache comes from watching blurry images on a small screen. Part of it comes from annoyance at a lack of annotation: there's so little information given about what you're seeing."