Motionbox is vamping up to be the next big thing in video sharing technology. With their recent release of deep tagging, they are certainly on their way. Unlike competitors who seem to be all about sharing well-produced, edited video, Motionbox is focused on making it easy for people who don’t have the time, chops, or tools for professional post-production to share the best nuggets of their footage with the folks who don’t have the time or patience to sit through the boring stuff. This week at Juxtaviews we get a peek inside the brain of Motionbox’s Cheif Architect, Andrew Wason.
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MOTIONBOX.COM
Andrew Wason, Chief Architect
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Name, age, foot size, and when you sleep at night you dream about…?
Andrew Wason, 41, size 12. I rarely remember my dreams these days, but the night after receiving this interview question I actually had a nightmare involving missed flights, missing connecting busses, running, running, leaving my laptop behind on a departing bus etc. I’m going to go out on a limb and interpret that as meaning I’m concerned about meeting deadlines.
Describe Motionbox in 5 words.
The official tagline is “get to the good stuff”, which luckily is exactly five words, so that was an easy one. The idea is to use technology to provide tools that allow viewers to skip the boring bits of personal video/home movies.
As Cheif Architect, what inspired you to become interested in programming in the first place?
I initially became interested during elementary school when the Radio Shack TRS-80 came out. Later I saved up for an Apple ][+ dream machine and took the high school CS course. At the same time I was also very interested in biology and majored in biology my first year of college, but my interest in software won and I switched majors.
In the past, you worked at both Softcom and then Interactive Video Technologies (www.ivtweb.com) before co-founding Motionbox. What learning Experiences from your previous positions have you brought with you to Motionbox? In other words, what were some of the mistakes you made along the way that would provide good advice to entrepreneurial developers exploring startups and/or Internet video today?
I think the most important thing is to stay on target. Decide who your audience/customer is and what need of theirs you are meeting and work towards that. It’s easy to get sidetracked by all the other potential markets for your product, and divert time and resources chasing them down while neglecting your original core goals.
What makes Motionbox unique? Why, as a user, would I choose Motionbox over one of your competitors (grouper, eyespot, jumpcut, etc)?
Motionbox is focused on making personal video manageable. For example, as a viewer, you can quickly preview a video by scrubbing through thumbnails on the site before deciding to play the video. Once you do play a video, you can scrub through a timeline of thumbnails to locate and seek directly to interesting sections. You can also use deep tags to find the good parts. Soon you will be able to mix together and edit the good bits of different videos into a new video. We are working on other tools to make it even easier for viewers to more easily find the good parts of a video.
The idea is to do this with minimal work for the content creator. e.g. I just want to shoot and upload raw, unedited video and offload the bulk of the work of tagging, classifying, editing onto other motivated viewers - e.g. motivated family members who have an interest in that content, are willing to watch the whole thing and will deep tag or remix the interesting pieces. So the next viewer can take advantage of work done by the previous viewer.
How many people currently work at Motionbox (and can you break it out into roles, example 5 developers, 2 designers, 1 PR person, etc)?
We don’t disclose numbers, but we are growing and would love to hear from great developers, video experts and product people. See our jobs page for more info http://www.motionbox.com/help/jobs
You recently implemented a feature called “deep tagging”, which allows a user to select “the highlights” of a video, and tag each clip separately, and eventually distribute the clips separately as a “self-contained” video. This is a revolutionary leap in the relationship between metadata and video. Is there anything more to deep tagging that we should know about?
Tagging at the file level works well for content like photos, but for video the file is really a container for a sequence of images so you need the ability to be more specific about what you are tagging.
Deep tagging can be used as a chaptering/table of contents mechanism to mark different scenes in a video. It can also be used to identify people/events occurring in a video (e.g. tag every scoring scene in a soccer game with “goal”). We are trying to accommodate both uses - e.g. the tag dropdown in the player is useful for chaptering, the visual tag timeline is more useful for locating event/object occurrences.
I can see different users interested in different segments of a video. Do all Motionbox users have the ability to “deep tag” other users videos, or only the user who “owns” the video?
Currently only the owner can tag their own videos. We are working on a more extensive rights/permissioning system that will control who can view/modify which aspects of a video.
How do you keep the tagging accurate so that someone can’t, for example, tag an advertisement for Viagra as “Paris Hilton”? Is there down-modding or expulsion for inaccurate tagging?
Currently you can tag your own videos however you like. As we allow users to tag each others videos, we will track tag ownership so you can choose to ignore tags from a certain user (e.g. only view your own tags on this video). We will probably also add the ability for users to flag tag spam, and remove repeat violators.
What has been the biggest challenge in developing and launching motionbox.com?
The challenge has been continuing to find new ways to help people deal with the “unproduced content problem”. People can shoot a lot of video and don’t want to spend hours editing it into a linear narrative that they can then share. So we’ve had to develop new technologies to let people browse, search and share in a non-linear way.
Where does video on the web go next… what’s the next progression?
One of the things we want to do is make it easier to get your video from Motionbox to other places - mobile devices, iPods, DVDs etc. So you could edit/mix and tag your videos online then have a DVD burned and mailed to you of your custom production.
What’s currently your favorite video posted on Motionbox?
Probably the haircut video, just because it’s interesting how fascinating people find it, but no one seems to know why. Someone told me they led an hour long discussion with a classroom full of university students trying to decide what it is that makes it interesting.