New York — Just two months after adding the video annotation functionality to its YouTube video-sharing website, Google on Wednesday announced that it has acquired video mashup/presentation company Omniso, a California-based social video start-up company for an undisclosed sum, which focuses on making videos more interactive.
Google disclosed the acquisition on its YouTube blog Wednesday but did not revealed terms.
“We are big fans of anything that helps people interact with online video and gives the YouTube community the opportunity to express themselves in creative ways,” Google’s YouTube team said.
The online service lets users to extract clips out of videos from sources like YouTube and blip.tv and string them together. The tool also allows users to annotate videos, mash various clips up, and synchronize Slideshare presentations to videos (great for conference presentations) within the video (similar to the Video Annotations tool that YouTube launched earlier this year).
Adding some video editing punch would not be a bad idea for YouTube; Craig was less than pleased with the company’s first attempt.
“The Omnisio team has a remarkable technical capability when it comes to advanced video tools and having this kind of talent at YouTube should further allow us explore new ways to enhance your YouTube experience,” YouTube said in a Wednesday night blog post.
Omnisio users can extract sections of clips they find on the web, they can then take those clips and stitch them together to form new, embeddable compilations, and generally add information to videos to enhance the viewing experience.
This acquisition marks Google’s second such deal this month. About two weeks ago, Google bought ZAO Begun, a Russian contextual advertising company, for $140 million.
Omnisio, which is a Y Combinator company, first demo’d to us in early March 2008, and it launched later that month.
The company was founded by three Australians (Ryan Junee, Julian Frumar and Simon Ratner).
“We believe we have only scratched the surface in terms of what is possible with online video, and we are really looking forward to taking the video viewing — and creating — experience to the next level,” Omnisio’s founders wrote on their Web site.
“We have been continually surprised by the creative and interesting stuff our users have built on the Omnisio platform — from hilarious video compilations, to witty (and yes sometimes over the top) in-video comments, to informative presentations with slides synced with video,” they wrote. “The enthusiastic adoption of our tools has exceeded our wildest expectations.”
The company will be incorporated into YouTube’s offering. We are trying to get details, but Omnisio co-founder and CEO Ryan Junee has declined to comment and Google had not responded to a request for comment as of this posting.