• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 17, 2019

Google on Tuesday announced that marketers and content creators now can link to key moments and content in videos. 

An updated forecast released by Publicis Media's Zenith unit on Tuesday shows time spent watching online video will expand more than 20% during the next two years to an average of 100 minutes daily.

People can now search for content and scan a video to determine whether a video has specific content. This change also makes video content more accessible for those using screen readers.

This change is made possible through Clip structures markup language or a time stamp provided by content creators.

Supporting this growth, YouTube creators can add time-stamp information to link important points in the description of their videos. Google's search technology can recognize the text and link exactly to that point in the video.

For example, in a video about podcasts, someone searching for information might find details about microphones at 0:56 in the video and details on boom arms at 2:28. Google will link directly to those points within a search. 

For other sites, Google introduced the ability to do this through a markup language. To enable Key Moments in Google Search, marketers can add Clip structured data to mark important segments in the video.

Pre-authorization is required for this beta, and creators must fill out a form and submit it to Google. Requests must meet several prerequisites such as the videos must be publicly available to watch without a subscription, have the ability to deep link into some point other than the start point in the video URL, have Clip structured data to a page where users can watch the video, ensure no two clips on the same video defined on the same page share a start time, among others.

An updated forecast released by Publicis Media's Zenith unit on Tuesday shows that time spent watching online video will expand more than 20% during the next two years to an average of 100 minutes daily.