“Let Me Comment on Your Video”: Supporting Personalized End-User Comments within Third-Party Online Videos Rodrigo Laiola Guimarães 1,2 , Pablo Cesar 1 and Dick C. A. Bulterman 1,2 1 CWI: Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica Science Park 123 1098 XG Amsterdam, The Netherlands +31 20 592 93 33 2 VU: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam De Boelelaan 1081 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands +31 20 598 2988 {rlaiola, p.s.cesar, dick.bulterman}@cwi.nl ABSTRACT Long before the first transmission in color of a World Cup in 1970, people used to gather around the few existing radio and TV sets to watch together and talk about their favorite programs. Decades later, not only the technology has significantly changed but also people’s consumption and commenting habits. Nowadays, one can easily watch an online video on demand and share comments with others asynchronously. However, current video commenting facilities do not take into account the temporal nature of videos. Viewers can only add comments that will then appear statically underneath the video. Motivated by a survey research on current media watching and commenting practices, we report on our findings from the evaluation of an online video commenting system that allows users to add synchronized comments to third-party videos. Our results indicate that users appreciate the functionalities of our system and find it better to comment when compared to existing tools. Ultimately, we hope that our work can bring insights to be considered in the design of next generation online video commenting tools. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.1.2 [Models and Principles]: User/Machine Systems – Human factors. H.5.1 [Information Interfaces and Presentations]: Multimedia Information Systems - Audio, Video. I.7.2 [Document and Text Processing]: Document Preparation - Format and notation, hypertext/hypermedia, Languages and Systems, Multi/mixed media. General Terms Design, Experimentation, Human Factors. Keywords End-user comments, Synchronization, Timed comments, Video commenting system, YouTube. 1. INTRODUCTION Uploading and sharing video online has become a global phenomenon as shown by the popularity of video viewing sites like YouTube 1 . Even social networks like Facebook, originally conceived for status updating, have become important distribution points for both consumer and professionally generated video [15]. At last, video has become a first class citizen of the Web. Nevertheless, there are some requirements that have yet to be met for providing rich multimedia Web experiences. Capturing and sharing videos online reflect the human need for communicating stories (by using implicit or explicit narrative structures). After all, sharing is intended to be a catalyst for communication among viewers of that content [10]. Recent developments on online video (and other media) sharing services 1 The services and technologies mentioned in this paper, if unknown, could easily be identified via a simple Web search, therefore they will not be Web-referenced. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. WebMedia’12, October 15–18, 2012, São Paulo/SP, Brazil. Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1706-1/12/10...$15.00. Figure 1. Typical end-user comment in YouTube. It appears statically underneath the third-party video. 253