Deep geotagging of videos – Motionbox

Motionbox, slightly different video sharing site, and one I really like, have introduced their planned “Deep Tagging” of videos. What the allows could be quite revolutionary. There are two ways that this works, as present. A drop down box under the video screen area, that allows a user to jump to segments of the video (useful for chapter style navigation), and a timeline section showing at-a-glance, with thumbnails, the deep tags within the video. Tags can also overlap over the same parts of the video. From a geospatial perspective this could be really powerful: A montage of nice bars in your town, each location being both geotagged and descriptive. A geoRSS feed of videos and parts of videos for an area. Links within the video to a map…

Videos can be located – not only that, but within the video, parts can also be located. Feed wise, to be able to grab a feed showing what videos, and parts of videos are around your area (like flickr photos) would be great. Where are there movies (or deep, hidden sections of a movie) that are tagged “London”. What parts of the world are people interested in.
I’ve made a little example from my recent trip to the Grindelwald area of Swiss Alps.

http://www.motionbox.com/video/player/a09fd8b81128

I’ve added geo:lat=x.xx and geo:lon=y.yy geotags, and also a combined one. Also added direction it was taken- “looking north”. But at present, the tag system strips out non-letters and the decimal place!, so geolon80445 However, a meta-tag of “geotagged” would give all those videos that are geotagged, perhaps a new tag could be found to point to geotags being embedded within… “geotaggedin” (thanks Andrew)

Also….Motionbox doesn’t have any kind of API at the moment, but from their jobs listings, possibly looks like they are looking to fulfil that gap. You can embed videos into blogs…(wordpress.com doesn’t support it yet).

Motionbox does have rss feeds for tags – http://www.motionbox.com/feeds/tag?tag=glacier&format=rss gives a simple feed for those tagged with “glacier”. Seems only to work with one tag at a time. But the searching by tags also picks up deep tags, as well as global meta-tags. (rss for “london”) Would be good to get a geoRSS feed for an area…
It does allow you to link to tagged sections directly, such as this but that doesn’t pass in the deep tag name as a parameter.

Deep tagging at present is very powerful for normal video navigation such as in this example – It gives the user a quick way to jump to the interesting bits – the deep tags can be used as simple chaptering, or a way to highlight different parts of a talk, demo, interview. From their blog: “Deep tagging allows you to highlight the moment when a certain person or place appears in the video, or mark a specific event captured in your video, so your viewers can skip right to the stuff they really want to see. You can even use deep tags to divide your video into chapters.”

Imagine a way to tag parts of a video as easily as clicking on a map, still cameras are having GPS embedded and linked, video cameras will soon have them too. But as seen with how easy and painless geocoding flickr photos is, this isn’t necessary. Imagine viewing a video of your favourite movie with direct links within the video to the locations that the scenes were shot. And a map showing all the locations, or routes of the movie… and then integrate it with the video, so they pop up as the video goes along. I’d like to see other videos taken in the same vicinity as mine, perhaps they were in totally different subjects. Imagine mapping a street for OSM, but instead of linking to each photo, you can link to a snippet of a video.

Something to look out for… lets hope Motionbox can rise to the challenge! 😉