Even though video has become a popular internet pastime over the past few years, there’s still a very little that average people can do with it. They can watch it, comment on it, and embed it on social networks and blogs if it tickles their fancies. Oh, and they can create it…but the majority of them won’t bother.
Omnisio wants to provide more options for us less creative types. Since most people don’t have enough time, patience or skill to record their own original content, Omnisio is giving them the tools needed to create mashups of other people’s original content.
As with Hulu, Omnisio users can extract sections of clips they find on the web (currently only those on YouTube, Google Video, or Blip.tv). They can then take those clips and stitch them together to form new, embeddable compilations. The process from start to finish is easy enough; just copy and paste the URLs of the videos you want, and drag a few sliders to indicate where each should begin and end. The only real beef I have with the tool is that (oddly) you can’t move the “start” slider to exactly where you want it; it only moves in 8-second increments. The “end” slider doesn’t have this problem.
The second innovation Omnisio brings to online video is a new commenting system that places comments within videos as popup bubbles. To be fair, these aren’t entirely new to the web; iminlikewithyou users are altogether too familiar with them. But they’re fun nonetheless, and it’s nice that you can use them to annotate videos with friends without interference from the mob that overruns YouTube.
Finally, the guys behind Omnisio are developing technology for combining slides with videos and tagging interesting people and highlights. The presentation functionality will essentially sync slides with various points within a video and show those slides in a dock below the video where you can click on them to skip around.
Omnisio is a Y Combinator company founded by Ryan Junee, Julian Frumar, and Simon Ratner. Expect even more capabilities from them down the line intended to put a “spine” into online video.
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