Add Comments to Videos with Outshouts

Outshouts is a new video service officially launching today that lets users personalize video clips with audio and video messages before sending out to friends.

To create an Outshout, users select a video through the search engine, which scours millions of videos already on the web. Once you have your video, users can tack on a video or audio message using a webcam or microphone. The example above taunts Brett Favre for being too old and uses a clip of Eli Manning from this past Super Bowl. Then email the Outshout or embed it into your blog of social network page.

VentureBeat writes that since Outshout’s quiet launch in July, the service has grown to more than 300,000 visits a month, with more than two million page views and that more than 500,000 Oushouts have been sent, shared or played. The company was formed in October of 2007, has four employees and is self-funded.

While Outshouts has been compared with Slide and RockYou, it’s also similar to PopTok, a service which allows you to send clips of famous movies to friends to create a video conversation.

Will Outshouts catch on? It seems more like a novelty at this point. All you’re doing is wrapping an intro message to a video. When people post or send video clips, they usually provide context already through the surrounding text of a blog post or an email message (“You should see this guy wipe out!”). Adding another layer to that just feels more like a pre-roll, one extra thing to sit through before getting to the content.