Gotuit introduces Scenemaker ... The AP on Online Movie Stores

- Gotuit Media just introduced a new service that allows video creators or viewers to index, tag, and describe Web video. Here's the Boston Globe piece. Hiawatha Bray writes:

The service currently works with videos hosted on two popular websites -- YouTube and MetaCafe -- with more video sites to come. Users who want to tag, or personally label, a video can click a button on a browser-based toolbar supplied by Gotuit. This automatically loads the video into the SceneMaker website. The site's software lets the user cut each video into a series of short clips. For instance, a YouTube video of a space shuttle launch can be edited into smaller clips showing engine ignition, liftoff, or the booster rockets falling away.

Each clip can be tagged with keywords, so that a Gotuit user can look up only the part of a video he wants to see. Instead of watching the entire shuttle launch video, a user can jump directly to, say, the booster separation. Links to these clips can also be e-mailed to friends.

SceneMaker doesn't modify the original video. All the tagging data reside on Gotuit's own servers. And anybody can tag a video -- their own or someone else's. Someone who publishes YouTube videos can include scene-by-scene tags. But any YouTube fan could create his own tags for his favorite video moments.

You can play around with the service here. And here's a how-to video from Gotuit.

Unfortunately, it isn't easy to figure out how to share the video you've just tagged, or what happens to it once you've tagged it. I spent ten minutes tagging a video -- very easy to do -- but the site simply makes the video vanish once you're done.

- The Associated Press looks at online movie purchasing options.