There is a theme running through the first session this morning: There are a lot of companies gunning for GooTube. Douglas Warshaw showed off Motionbox which definitely builds on YouTube. Just yesterday as I was uploading video to YouTube, I was wishing that they had some simple editing tools. All I wanted to do was to ‘top and tail’ the video, cut off the bit where I told the person I was interviewing that we were recording. Motionbox allows that.

The web is truly becoming a platform, and these new video services definitely show that. Motionbox generates a series of thumbnails that make scanning and editing video easier.

Douglas was pitching Motionbox to media companies who wanted to set up a service to take in videos from their audience. One of the most problems that companies face in opening up to a lot of video is evaluating all of the material. Creating a stream of thumbnails allow editors to quickly scan video.

Rodrigo Sepulveda-Schulz of vpod.tv allows companies or people to set up their own online TV channel. The tools were very elegant, especially when you consider that it was all done within a web browser. It’s was like embedding iMovie in a web browser. Before broadband, this would have been impossible, but it also showed how far interface design online is evolving.

Video clips are just drag-and-dropped into a channel schedule. Sites on vpod.tv can be ‘reskinned’ at the click of a button, just selecting a drop down menu, the entire look of the site changes. These tools are going to allow a lot of entrants into the online video business.

technorati tags:video, online, YouTube, TV, BitTorrent