Microsoft might be adding the ability to create shoppable videos into all of its products and services
The technology was patented and made public a few weeks ago.
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Shoppable videos are not exactly old; they’ve been around only for a few years when platforms such as TikTok, Reels, and YouTube Shorts have gained popularity. With them, businesses of any kind -mainly retail-based ones – can promote and merchandise their products and services simultaneously using the same video content.
With the video-based platforms gaining so much popularity that their disruption also becomes their ending – we see you, TikTok, it seems that Microsoft is thinking about venturing into the world of video content with a tech that allows users to create shoppable videos easily.
The Redmond-based tech giant has already patented the technology in the recently published paper that details how it will work. The paper, BUILDING SHOPPABLE VIDEO CORPUS OUT OF A GENERIC VIDEO CORPUS VIA VIDEO META DATA LINK, describes a system that allows users to make video content “shippable.”
What does this mean? It means clicking on something in the video to buy it directly.
How would it work? Well, the system generates unique URLs (web links) from the video content to achieve this. These URLs are the key to making the items in the video clickable and purchasable.
The system extracts these URLs from a collection of videos. These extracted URLs can be long or short. Once extracted, they are combined and processed to ensure they are in a standard format (normalized).
Any unnecessary information (noise) is removed from the URLs, and a quality check is conducted to ensure the URLs are clear and functional.
After cleaning up and checking the URLs, they are presented to users as personalized recommendations on their devices. This means users will see links to items they can buy directly related to their interests or previous activities.
The videos and their associated data (metadata) are saved in a database for future reference. This ensures that the system can keep track of the items and provide relevant recommendations in the future.
In the paper, Microsoft says that its shoppable video technology can be implemented in Windows as a feature to a native application, or it can also exist as a feature inside Microsoft Edge. It can be released as software and used on PCs and mobile phones.
Given the recent enhancements to Microsoft Designer, Microsoft Paint, and Clipchamp, the Redmond-based tech giant can release such a technology, as it would make these platforms even more helpful to users than they already are.
I’m also thinking about this being a feature for Copilot+ PCs, since they’re devices especially made for productivity. Copilot+ PCs already have an NPU capable of empowering valuable features such as Paint’s Cocreator or Microsoft Designer. However, we’ll have to wait and see.
You can read the full paper here.
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