vSocial Adds Video Sampling

Startup vSocial, which sells white-label video-sharing solutions, also has a destination site where it plays with new features. Today, the company launched something kind of cool — a way for users to clip and “quote” pieces of video, adding tags and inline comments.

Far more robust features are offered by web editing services like Jumpcut and Eyespot — which aren’t really all that robust anyways; the point is they’re simple and web-based. However, sites like those are tools for mucking around with video plucked from a personal collections and promos. The neat thing about “vQuote,” as it is called, is you can grab pieces of video from around vSocial.

Tempe, Arizona-based vSocial has about 4.5 million monthly unique visitors — which by some counts puts it in the top 10 video sites by traffic, but by that point you’ve already gotten to the long tail of the chart. It has a library of about 50,000 public videos.

“Quoting” robs a clip from the context it’s based in, but it makes it much easier to have conversations about a specific moment in a video, or make comparisons about portions of two or more videos. Basically, it’s a blogging tool. I’d be interested in seeing such a tool proliferate across other video sites with larger libraries and larger audiences.

Of course, sampling is a tricky area of copyright. vQuote attempts to respect copyright by giving full credit to the original uploader, and offering controls at the time of upload for the maximum allowed sample length. Of course, that person isn’t always the content owner.

However, vSocial maintains a sort of trackback between the sample and the master work, with notations for “uploaded by” and “quoted by,” and doesn’t allow users to quote a quote. It also maintains in-video advertising it has already placed on the video (though an ad by someone else might get clipped in the process of quoting).