Firm aims to ease Net video search

Gotuit Media Corp., a Woburn maker of video indexing software for the cable TV industry, is rolling out a new online service that lets Internet video fans generate moment-by-moment indexes of their movies.

"Video search is this sort of holy grail," said Gotuit president Mark Pascarella. "It allows consumers to get the video content they're interested in."

Even though most online videos are brief, it can still be frustrating to watch an entire video in search of a few seconds of entertainment. Gotuit's SceneMaker service aims to solve this problem.

The service currently works with videos hosted on two popular websites -- YouTube and MetaCafe -- with more video sites to come. Users who want to tag, or personally label, a video can click a button on a browser-based toolbar supplied by Gotuit. This automatically loads the video into the SceneMaker website. The site's software lets the user cut each video into a series of short clips. For instance, a YouTube video of a space shuttle launch can be edited into smaller clips showing engine ignition, liftoff, or the booster rockets falling away.

Each clip can be tagged with keywords, so that a Gotuit user can look up only the part of a video he wants to see. Instead of watching the entire shuttle launch video, a user can jump directly to, say, the booster separation. Links to these clips can also be e-mailed to friends.

SceneMaker doesn't modify the original video. All the tagging data reside on Gotuit's own servers. And anybody can tag a video -- their own or someone else's. Someone who publishes YouTube videos can include scene-by-scene tags. But any YouTube fan could create his own tags for his favorite video moments.

"It's a very interesting concept," said Michael Goodman , program manager for digital entertainment at the Yankee Group in Boston. "One of the most difficult things is separating the good from the bad, the wheat from the chaff in Internet video. This is another effort . . . to add some order to an inherently disorganized collection of Internet videos."

Gotuit joins a number of companies developing ways to simplify Internet video search. BBN Technologies Corp. of Cambridge offers Podzinger, a service that uses speech recognition technology to identify the words being said in online video and audio files. It then generates an index from those words that can be used to look up videos on specific topics. Podzinger can take the user directly to a specific portion of a video or audio podcast by keying on the words being spoken at that point in the file. Another online service, Blinkx, uses a similar technology, combined with an index that analyzes the closed captions embedded in many TV programs.

But unlike these rival services, SceneMaker's index will be based on the judgment of thousands of human users. "We're giving the community the power to interpret and describe every video scene," said Pascarella.

SceneMaker will be free to users, but Pascarella said Gotuit hopes to attract a lot of advertising revenue. He plans to link ads to the tags generated by users. For instance, someone who runs a search for "shuttle" could see an ad for science fiction books or vacation tours of the Kennedy Space Center.

"It gives the marketers the ability to target the words," said Pascarella.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.