VidSnippets, a video searching and editing tool, is gathering names of individuals and organizations interested in participating in a free 30-day trial. The company will select the participants in the trials, which will begin later this month and continue through December and January. 

Started at the Masters of Technology, Entrepreneurship and Innovation program at St. Mary’s University in 2014, co-founders Paul Farmer and Suman Pettem created a tool so users can highlight the best or most important parts of a video. The selected segments are automatically combined into custom trailers that retain their linkage to the source video. Viewers can hover over the related thumbnail to trigger the trailer and access the source video with a single click of their mouse to see more content.

In an interview, VidSnippets President Farmer cited a study that revealed that half of business content will be non-text by 2017. He also cited another study which said that today 44 percent of knowledge workers can’t find the right information.

“Video is a rich media for conveying a lot of information,” Farmer said.  “But it’s not very searchable right now.”

VidSnippets offers a “metadata management platform” for videos. Video creators can search the video like a Word document to find the most relevant points, and then make a trailer out of it.

The software, which will be offered as a SaaS solution, allows users to tag the entire trailer or any of the highlighted segments. Someone can then search the video using text or keywords, and the tags will bring together all the content related to the search.

Enhanced tools for in-video tagging & searching are planned for development in 2016.

VidSnippets can tag in any language. Video creators can use VidSnippets regardless of the video’s content or the device used to record the video provided the video can be converted into a MP4 format.

“Once the video’s captured, we’re going to let you do more with it,” Farmer said.

VidSnippets offers analytics on videos. The software can offer more detailed viewer activity tracking and engagement analytics than YouTube because it assesses them on a per-user/per-session basis.

Farmer said that he and his team already have big plans for VidSnippets next year. The team hopes to unveil native and mobile version of the software in 2016. This new version would allow companies to take VidSnippets with them when they go out to film. The workers can use VidSnippets while they shoot, allowing them to edit on-site, rather than return back to the office and realize they need to go back to the site to get more shots.

For the past year, VidSnippets bootstrapped and used some government funding. Farmer said that he hopes once the company gains customers—hopefully through the 30-day trials starting later this month—they’ll start funding rounds with investors.

“We’re going to increase their usefulness,” Farmer said. “The whole idea is to make video a more searchable, usable and valuable asset.”

Anyone interested in participating in VidSnippets’ 30-day trial can contact Paul Farmer at paul@vidsnippets.com.