Veotag: empowered video

veotag is an exciting new service that lets you display clickable text, called "veotags," within an audio or video file.
Your audience can see the veotags whenever they play your file on the web. Clicking on a veotag lets your audience jump right to that part of the file.

• Make tables of contents, chapter headings, and menus that help your audience (and search engines) see what’s inside your audio or video.
• Add tags, transcripts, notes, and comments that enrich your audience’s experience
• You can even veotag other people’s audio and video you find on the web!

veotagging adds a professional touch to any audio or video file you want your audience to spend time with and enjoy.

The first veotag video I saw was a video of a conference which Guy Kawasaki was a part of. The interface is pretty appealing because, as the veotag tagline puts it, this is video that clicks. As you can see from the screenshot below, you can click on topics or portions of the video that appeal to you and pretty much skip ahead or back as much as you would like.

So what could you use veotag for in your business? Well, here are a few ideas:

As a business person, you put audio and video on the web for one reason. You want the people you do business with to watch, listen and comprehend.
But your audience has a short attention span. They want to know what’s inside your audio and video. They want to be able to click directly to the parts that interest them most.
By veotagging your audio and video, you give them information and convenience, which means they’ll spend more time listening and watching.
Any business that puts audio or video on the web or helps others do so — can benefit from doing business with veotag.
Entertainment and news sites can veotag their vast libraries of audio and video files to give more information and make them easier for their audience to find and they can let their audience create their own veotags and share them with their friends.

• Jazz at Lincoln Center recently posted on its site several videos of its masters’ classes, some of which are three hours long. To help its audience enjoy these fascinating but lengthy videos, it veotagged them to break them into digestible chapters.
• Colorado State University posted a 20-minute highlight video of great moments in its sports history. They veotagged it to help its audience understand what it was seeing, and let them jump around to view their favorite parts.

Corporate sites can get new value from company videos like training classes, speeches, video news releases, analyst meetings, demonstrations and presentations by veotagging them and making them available to the public. Or they can restrict viewing to employees or customers only.
Audio/video marketplaces can differentiate themselves from their competition by offering veotag services to their users who want to put a professional finishing touch on their audio and video files.
Professional videographers can offer a profitable new service that their customers will love. Wedding, event, and corporate videos can be veotagged for extra enjoyment and understanding.
Search engines can offer the veotag Library to their users, giving them a new way to find relevant audio and video content on the web.
veotag for business is an upgrade to the personal version that gives you greater control over your audience’s experience.
With veotag for Business, you get features and flexibility to control your audience’s experience you don’t get with our free basic service:

• Show veotagged audio and video content without your audience seeing advertising
• Control the branding your audience sees
• Host veotagged content behind your firewall for best performance
• Host pay-per-views of your content
• Password restrict your content, or just the veotags
• Show additional content, such as PowerPoint slides, while your audio and video plays
• Track and report viewing statistics
• Let multiple employees create and edit veotags
• Share confidential information about content you have seen

When I saw veotag in action I really saw it as a great supplement to conferences as well as for educational purposes. What better way to help students review lectures than by taking a lecture you may film anyway and uploading it to veotag for later review?

I must just point out that while I have focussed on video, veotag also works well with audio. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch recently mentioned that an episode of TalkCrunch, his podcast, was recently given the veotag treatment. This starts to position veotag as a potential competitor to podcast search engine, Podzinger.

What is also pretty handy is that it is now possible to embed a veotag video/audio file in your blog. This link is to a post on the veotag blog showing the embedded player in action. I tried to replicate that here in this post but didn’t find an option to embed a veotag item so this could still be in development. Perhaps someone from veotag could enlighten us if they see my trackback.

Have any of you used veotag? What are your thoughts?

Tags: veotag, online video, clickable video, click video, chapters