Digesting the longtail of video

How do we digest the Longtail of online video? The amount of video-sharing that has occured in the past year has been nothing short of phenomenal. There's YouTube and MySpace. That we all know. So now what?

Our very behavior has changed, and our demands have increased. We now want programming on-demand, on a variety of devices. We want more customization for the programs we watch. We want better ways to search for, share and discover new videos. We plain and simply want more options.

There are a few sites, some new and others established, who are readily taking on the task of sifting through all of this online video data, and breaking it down into smaller pieces for us to digest. It's very important, given that the growing long tail of user-generated content, multiple uploads of the same video on various hosting sites, and the difficulty in tagging and searching for visual content. Unlike text, which can easily be searched for using algorithms, videos are in a different context that cannot be so easily indexed. A social component is quite necessary for the searchable catalog of online video, and all of these sites have addressed this very issue.

Muuvu is a newcomer, having created a niche social search engine that encourages the discovery of new music through user-ranked videos embedded on their site. Based in Australia, Julian Bakalov, founding director of Muuvu, raises the important fact that large media companies not only disagree when it comes to distribution rights in other companies, but lack the ability to stay nimble and attend to the public demand. "big companies take their time when it comes to progress. I just tried to view an episode of Lost online at ABC.com and got the message that it is not available for viewing in [Australia]. By the time media companies have agreed on the terms, millions will already have downloaded their content illegally," says Bakalov in a recent interview.

Muuvu is an aggregator for a very specific type of video that users can form a community around. In this way, Muuvu is taking a piece of the pie and cutting out all the fat that would otherwise slow down the search for that music video you're looking for. The community is self-regulated, so it's a rather democratic process by which the social and search aspects of Muuvu operate.

MyWaves is another video aggregator of sorts. They enable you to create your own television/video programming so that your channels are fully customized. They pull video data from various RSS feeds around the web, and the end result is over 20,000 channels from which you can pick and choose the programming you'd like to watch, and choose when you'd like to watch it. They make all of those channels mobile by giving you access to MyWaves through your cell phone. The social aspects of their service make for an easy way to share and reccomend programming, and even create private channels for which to share videos and upload priveldges with a select few.

PureVideo is a search engine that is dedicated to finding online videos. They rigirously scour the web, crawling for those videos we love to watch. They are then segmented into channels to become easily digestable for us to look through. PureVideo co-founders Greg Morrow and Erik Hawkins recal how they came up with the idea for their service; "Several years ago, we toyed with the concept of a TV Guide for the Web. Realizing that online video would explode, we figured someone had to come up with a simple way of finding the best stuff online." And finding the best stuff online is exactly what you can do with PureVideo. They specialize in searching for the visual manifestations we all crave.

This article was written by Kristen Nicole, who writes for 606tech.com.