VentureBeat

Online videos are a lot harder to browse than text. It’s easy to skim a blog post for a part that interests you, but with a video, there’s no way to avoid watching everything you don’t care about unless you haphazardly fast-forward your way through. And while search engines are great at searching text on web pages, they can at best only access a video’s metadata (like length, date updated, etc.). The math is easy for us bloggers. We can cover more issues and produce higher quality post with text than with video, and text gives us an easier means of distribution.

Thing is, though, people often prefer watching videos to reading. Which is why Veotag is an interesting company. If you have a video you want to upload to the web, Veotag lets you tag the most interesting parts of the video. You upload your video into Veotag — whether you’re using Quicktime, Windows Media or Flash format — and then you create a table of contents with links that direct others to select parts of the video. You can also include slides and notes under a tag, and share the tag links with friends.

See the screenshot of the video, above, where company chief executive Scott Rhodes discusses his own company. Table of contents and tags are to the right of the video. The service is also available for audio tracks.

Also, very importantly, search engines can discover the tags you create in Veotag, and with more data available about your content, your video will be more accurately categorized and may be ranked higher in search results.

Other companies offer tagging. Video-sharing site Viddler also lets you tag video segments, but it’s more of an add-on feature that’s not focused on letting you create more content around your tag. Multi-purpose video platform Pluggd also lets you add tags, but the company focuses on letting you do things like add advertising into your videos, and its tags don’t appear in search results. We’ve found Veotag to be the easiest to use.

New York-based Veotag has just raised $1.2 million from Small Ventures USA. The company raised a smaller amount from the same firm last year.

New York company Veotag has raised an angel round of $750,000 to build out its nifty video time-stamp tagging feature.

By time-stamp tags, we mean that Veotag lets you list the different events or subjects appearing in your video — according to the exact time they appear in the video.

The concept is instantly understood by clicking on the screenshot below, or here to see a demo of how it works. Surprise — an attractive blonde is hired to do the demo :)

Our arrows point to some of the tags. You can click on these tags, and they are made into link that you can send to your friends. Moreover, the tags are searched by search engines, so that if there’s a very popular five-second part of the video, that tagged part can be linked to by bloggers and other people — thus making it rank high within search engines. This allows the imagination to wander. If videos are tagged, they’ll be brought into that nirvana of search advertising. Google could contain these little video snippets (corresponding to the tags) within its search results, and make serious money with ads beside them.

Anyone can take a video (Windows Media, QuickTime and Flash formats), create the tags and publish.

No one is doing tagging as simply and straight-forwardly with text as Veotag. Motionbox lets you tag with visual stills, and Viddler also has tags, though not as neatly portrayed in a separate window as done by Veotag. Pluggd does a cool search of files, but searches for words you are looking for within the video, and is not an indexing tool. Click.TV, meanwhiles, does get close, but its tags are comments left by other people. You’ll have to take a look at each of these to understand the distinction.

Here’s an example of an authentic veotagged video: A speech by investor Guy Kawasaki, featured on Veotag’s homepage.