I recently came across a YouTube video of Michael Arrington interviewing Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo. The 25-minute video is priceless because at 23:02 Bartz launches into a tirade that culminates at 23:40 – where she tells Arrington to f-off! I thought it would be fun to share it with my friends, but knowing that no one wants to sit through the whole video, I had to find the start and stop times and email them along with the link. Doing that once is not a big deal, but it’s a huge hassle to do it routinely. Plus it limits my distribution options. 140 characters is a tough fit, and I can’t Digg it, or share it with StumbleUpon, or add it as a Delicious bookmark because there’s no way to specify the start/stop times.
Now you understand what inspired our latest innovation. The social video clipping tool lets you quickly create and share a section of a video simply by highlighting the spoken words in the transcript. This generates a unique link that contains the video start and stop information so that it can be emailed or shared through any social media outlet. It’s simple and fast!
This makes life easier for me, as a consumer, but the biggest benefit comes to YouTube, or whoever is publishing the video. That’s because easier to share = more video views = higher likelihood of going viral. In the fierce pursuit to create the next viral video, content publishers now have a new tool that stimulates activity and provides convenience. In the age of Twitter, people don’t have the patience for extraneous stuff; they crave short bursts of concentrated, hyper-relevant content. And that’s what our video clipping tool is all about.
Try it out on this demo page: http://www.3playmedia.com/interactive/video-clipping/
What do you think?
Tags: sharing, social media, transcript, video bookmarking, video clipping
