Content Rejuvenation

Rejuvenate: v. make young again, restore youth; become young again; make a company or organization more efficient and productive by implementing new methods and concepts; restore something to its original condition; revitalize; make new again; revive, renew

Video is a highly effective medium for information and knowledge exchange. The growth in usage of Video as a communication tool over the last many decades has been phenomenal. From entertainment to education, from news to corporate learning, video is the medium of choice.

An industry of professional video content editors has formed to work on videos. This includes mixing, remixing, dubbing, cleaning, editing, improving quality, re-facing and adding effects to existing videos. Utility of such effort ranges from Advertisement to Entertainment to Training industry videos.

With the rise of internet videos and the connected web, innovations called Mashups have started brewing. These are aimed at combining various videos and text content together in a web-page like format. However, video does not yield easily to be mixed online without the use of complex video editing tools. A number of "overlay" technologies have thus come to form.

Having a technology that allows adding images, audio, and text captions to videos, on the fly and over the web, opens a whole new array of possibilities in today's web-aware world. People can tag, retag, modify each other's videos for fun and entertainment. This technology is especially useful in the domain of training and learning, where content produced somewhere else can be reused and rejuvenated to make a point effectively.

Ultra Mashup Studio and Player technologies are innovations by Softech Worldwide that target this very area. The Ultra Mashup Studio allows flexible and powerful ways to combine audio, other videos, images, text and feedback forms to an existing video. The video could be one uploaded by a User or linked to another video over the web, residing on a media sharing site. The overlayed contents can also be either uploaded or residing on a media sharing site.

Adding Interactivity

Multimedia, especially video, is traditionally a one-way communication medium. Additional and complementary technologies and services are required to enable audiences to provide their feedback, ask questions, etc. Even that is mostly an offline process.

Interactivity for the Learning industry has a different meaning. Level 1 and level 2 evaluations are required in any Learning Management System to gauge the effectiveness of a training program and learners' satisfaction with the content.

It is often desirable in many situations, whether in learning, knowledge, information or entertainment scenarios, to gather viewer response. This can be for surveys, opinion polls, comments on parts of a video, gathering viewer data such as gender and age, gathering viewer likes and dislikes about a video or a portion of it, etc.

Embedding interactivity on a volume scale with any video anytime requires significant manpower, technical expertise and effort. Having this ability to do it quickly over the web can be a huge time and cost saver.

Ultra Mashup Studio and Player technologies provide just the right mix of ingredients to make Rich Internet Media Content delivery possible. Wikipedia defines Rich Media as Interactive Multimedia. Ultra Mashup Studio makes it ultra easy to add interactivity to existing video content without the need for technical expertise.

Advertisement

Rich Media Advertising is a concept that is catching on fast. The potential of embedding advertisements into video content is proportional to the rise in video viewership. With TV phasing out to online alternatives, video sharing becoming ubiquitous, people launching their own TV channels and chatting direcly over video, the potential for advertisement revenue in this medium is yet to be understood.

The ability offered by Ultra Mashup Studio and Player technologies in allowing easy and web-based embedding of videos in videos and text captions, images and audios, overlayed over each other if needed, makes rich media advertisement accessible to any content author.

To be noted is the fact that the Ultra Mashup Studio does NOT alter anything in any of the constituent video or other components. It simply combines them during playing and pulls data on demand at the time of playing. The technology merely stores the meta information that combines these elements in a user-defined manner.

Training and Learning

Training content providers must employ technical expertise to add interactivity to learning content. Training managers and teachers often require frequent changes to the interactive portion of the trainings, such as quiz questions and answers. This can become a potential issue to maintain many versions of each training.

The availability on the internet of large amounts of data that can contribute to learning content, coupled with the transformation of traditional learning environments to web-aware students and corporate learners, and the need to provide on-demand learning rapidly, is adding to the burden of content providers to meet the needs of their customers in a rapid and scalable manner.

Ultra Mashup Studio and Player technologies and its companion technologies: Ultra Tracking and Ultra Feedback, provide content providers a unique ability to meet this demand for their customers.

Multiple feedback forms can be embedded within rich media mashups to gauge learner's understanding of the training contents. Tracking can be utilized to track learner's progress throughout a course. Tracking combined with feedback and ratings and comments, provide a good insight into the effectiveness of a content. This information can be used to improve and rejuventate the content further...very easily with Ultra Mashup Studio.