Critical Eye: Soompi’s Image2Play Technology Is Sorta Awesome

On February 14th, Soompi announced the integration of Image2Play into their site, a new bit of technology that was developed by their parent company, Enswers.

Unsurprisingly, they hyped it up as an awesome new gadget that would improve the usability of their site.

We are excited to announce the beta launch of Image2Play on Soompi! Image2Play is a service that analyzes images and matches them up with the corresponding video for you to play. Have you ever looked at a screenshot from a variety show or drama and wanted to be able to watch it? Now you can! Check out a couple examples here. (Click the blue triangle logo in the upper right corner to view the clips associated with these screenshots!)

As always, I took a skeptical and cynical approach to it, unsure if this would actually be useful or that it would actually work to begin with.

Well, after a little over a week of seeing it in action, I can say that it’s a wonderful idea that was executed well.

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The idea itself is awesome, because I hate seeing a news item that talks about a video but doesn’t give me the video to watch, so I end up having to waste seconds (IF NOT MINUTES!) of my precious, glorious, wonderful life trying to troll around for it.

Image2Play basically solves that problem by connecting every picture that is taken from video to the video itself. How the fuck does that work? I have no fucking idea, but it’s awesome.

I’m not sure this has wide reaching application for areas like America, because everything is generally accessible through YouTube here, but for hard to find clips in the Korean entertainment industry? This could certainly become truly useful.

Of course that’s not to say it’s perfect, as I’ve seen complaints that the blue arrow takes a while to load, though I’ve never experienced problems with that myself. What I have seen is that it does take a bit of time to load and I can’t find a way to embed the video, though I suppose the latter issue is part of the point.

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Relatively minor criticisms aside, the addition of this technology basically eliminates one of my pet peeves in Korean entertainment, articles about variety/talk shows that don’t include video. Combine that with the fact that allkpop makes it continuously harder to view videos on their site with their new Kim Jong Un totalitarian dictator video player skin, and I think Soompi deserves more praise and hype for this addition than it seems to be getting.