Color tagging in video, potential YouTube cleanup?

by on September 9, 2006

Tom Stitt, managing partner at Aperial Technology Ventures LLC came and visited me at the house for lunch (Patrick and I are going to the beach now). He has some interesting technologies cooking. I love seeing stuff like this when it’s still in the coding stage (he works with four developers in Russia who are super math whizzes).

One problem with stuff that’s simply cool technology is that it’s hard to productize. What do I mean? Well, he has one technology that analyzes motion in video. You put these colored tapes on your wrist, elbow, shoulder and bat and then you video yourself swinging a baseball bat (or fly fishing, or doing other things like throwing a basketball) and then feed that video into his system (he calls it “MyGameCoach”) then it tracks those tags in video and can even compare your swing to a professional and give you tips on how to make your swing better.

His team is preparing a prototype site so you can see this in action. It’s pretty cool.

And this is the rub. It’s cool, but how do you make money? Well, you could sell it to professional sports teams (he’s working with at least one). You could sell it to little leagues or baseball coaches, but that’s going to be pretty hard.

Another thing that those smart engineers are working on? Ways to clean up video. He showed me that they can take the average YouTube video and dramatically clean it up and make the compression work better. But YouTube doesn’t care, right?

Well, how much are they paying in bandwidth a month? I heard it’s about a million a month. If they could reduce that by 10%, while improving quality, that’d end up saving millions every year and give its users a better experience (videos could download quicker).

But he says getting anyone to invest money in improved codecs and other techniques to clean up the videos is like pulling teeth. Why is that?

Here’s another technology the smart kids in Russia are working on: a way to remove things from videos. He showed me a video that had a logo completely removed. You couldn’t tell. Do you believe what you see in videos? You shouldn’t. He showed me a video where a guy jumping was completely removed from the video using their technology.

These are cool technologies. I wonder when we’ll see them in real products or used on services like Blip.TV, Google Video, YouTube?

  • very nice blog
  • At comments 9 and 10: where is anything like that mentioned in the post?
  • @9&10: where is anything like that mentioned in the post?
  • Christopher Coulter
    I wonder when we’ll see them in real products

    Ummm, every single day, for the past decade, at every TV, Hollywoodish and SFX and Video Productional house on the planet. Heck, I use removals for genericish Wedding Videos.
  • Christopher Coulter
    Yeah, Philips is all over this, even the Lumalive on clothes no less. Nothing new, all over in Sports ads.

    Then you got Massive Incorporated doing ad updates for the video game industry, and the 'Need for Speed Carbon' and 'Battlefield 2142' changing ads.
  • Soumitra
    This stuff is quite old. Has been around since the mid 90's when I used to work at Philips Research. The same technology can be used to put ads on tennis courts during Wimbledon and put country specific banner inserts into TV feeds from fast moving World Cup Soccer. Philips, Sony and other companies in broadcast video technology are already using this stuff. Your VC friend should check some of the patents filed by Philips Research in the US before investing in this stuff.
  • I wonder when we’ll see them in real products

    You mean, like, the news?
  • Christopher Coulter
    Interesting, wow, so you interviewed a semi-halfway real company this time around? Not just some foamy frothy Web 2.0 feature-posing-as-a-company?

    But what does it do differenly that I can't get from Imagineer's mokey and monet?

    http://www.mokey.com/products/monet/

    It's just bringing Imagineer to the consumer space?
  • There is a company called GolfTec ( http://www.golftec.com/ ) that uses (very) similar technology. (Far outside the froth :-) )

    I know somone who has two of the franchise locations locally, and they seem to be doing very well with the non-tech golfer crowd.
  • Why is that? Because neat ideas do not equate to genuine consumer demand.
  • You mention the "recognition software" for athletes. I wonder the extent to which this sort of video and image recognition has a big part to play in future sites.

    For example there's a site that tries to map your face to celebrities (forget url). Cool idea, but for my photo I saw zero similarity.

    Think of ways that a site could "recognize" a "more ideal" version of a photo or video? I don't even know if these exhist.

    Certainly plastic surgeons use software to do 3d analysis of before and after what you might look like from some surgery. Imagine if you could upload a high-res image of your face and chane things like your nose to see what you look like when different "ideal" charactoristics are mapped over how you look.
  • A similar technique was shown in the WWDC during the Leopard preview. In iChat the background during a video chat was replaced with a picture. The process is similar, but simplified by the fact that it involves a display with a static background being replaced. Pixels not matching with the background set are shown "live".
  • My brothers golf coach has a system where he videos the student and can then compare/overlay onto pro swings for comparison. But, if a person could do it themselves...hmmmm.
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