Video Sphere

dotSUB may be the new killer application for online videos after YouTube !

This website is really innovative, even if its design is really ugly. But I’m sure you can’t wait and want to know what’s behind this very basic blue logo:

Take YouTube and Wikipedia and imagine the kind of collaborative video website you could create…

Did you find ? No ?

What if you were able to watch videos produced by anyone in the world, meaning in local languages that you probably don’t know ?

What does it mean ? Being able to watch and share videos from all over the world, even if I don’t understand a single word ?

Upload and add subtitle to videos:

Yes, dotSUB is a collaborative website where anyone can create and share subtitles for videos. Let’s take an example: you have a blog where you put videos in your very own language, but you would like anyone to be able to follow what you are saying in your videos…

With dotSUB, you are jsut 3 steps away of that goal:

1) Upload your video.

2) Create your own subtitle (called transcript) in English to have a lot of people able to understand it.

3) Share your video and allow viewers to add their own subtitles in their languages.

Collaborative power for to raise visibility of good content:

If your content (your videos) are really valuable, a lot of viewers will be interesting in sharing your video, and maybe they will add subtitles in their own language, allowing even more people to see your video, and once again to add new subtitles…

This is a viral effect that allow to make naturally interesting content more visible…

Thanks to Wikipedia, collaborative content is now more trusted by users, allowing the creation of new free services such as this fabulous dotSUB.

Every options of a good video sharing website:

Of course, almost any major feature of YouTube is implemented such as video categorization, collection creation, direct link to video,…

Of course, dotSUB provides the html code allowing to embed the video with the subtitle of your choice on your blog.

Here is a presentation of dotSUB by Joanne for Rocketboom with English subtitles:

Some ideas of features to add to dotSUB:

I would like to have the possibility of simply providing a YouTube (or equivalent) URL rather than uploading a video.

The design is too simple and colors too ugly to be eye catching…that may be a problem to make this fabulous website popular.

The video player is also quite ugly compared to other video sharing website. That’s not a dumb option, since each posted video will make dotSUB more visible on the blogosphere !

Searching within subtitles and not only parameters (name, description, tags) of videos would be very interesting !

Here is an extract of what the dotSUB founder says about his baby:

“The dotSUB tool will enable human beings and corporations and organizations to use video as a communication tool to seamlessly and inexpensively communicate across cultures. […]

And what we have done at dotSUB is realize that there’s a global audience that is more and more connected. […]

But traditional media and traditional methods and tools for subtitling are very expensive and time-consuming and costly.

So we have attempted to create a browser-based tool that’s as simple to use as the Google Search Bar…”