‘SI’ Picks Gotuit for NFL Draft Project

The metadata search capabilities of online video infrastructure startup Gotuit has helped land an important deal — to provide the backend heavy-lifting for Sports Illustrated’s online NFL draft project, NFL Draft 2007 FilmRoom.

The Gotuit-powered site will feature a searchable stack of video highlight clips of the top 200 projected college football players eligible for the April 28-29 draft (including LSU quarterback JaMarcus Russell, featured in the clip below). For football zealots, the NFL draft is a sort-of combination of lottery show and fantasy league, with a devoted following who may well go stark raving nuts over a web page full of highlight clips searchable by play, player, place of purported education, and several other categories. For Gotuit, the shine of being picked first by a heavyweight like SI can only help as the company tries to differentiate itself from competitors like Brightcove or YouTube.

What makes Gotuit’s big-stage entry into white-label video search different is its old-school reliance on human editors, not algorithms, to parse and tag video clips. “There are just some things human beings can do better than machines,” said Gotuit spokesperson David Laubner. By reviewing video clips for SI, Gotuit was able to help sort the highlight reels into categories like Big Plays, Touchdowns, and Big Passes, which draftniks can then use to move instantly to the parts of a video they want to see. Videos and clips can also be embedded in blogs (yay!) or shared via email.

Whether or not such granularity in search and navigation pays off in bigger deals for Gotuit may be kind of like waiting to see if your team drafted an instant star like Reggie Bush or a bust like Brian Bosworth. At the very least, the SI deal gives Gotuit a chance to show its stuff on a big-media stage.

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