Last year, Google, Bing and Yahoo teamed up to announced schema.org, an initiative to supporta a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages.
Schema.org got some rich snippet markup for music a couple months later, which servies like MySpace, Rhapsody and ReverbNation immediately started implementing.
Google announced today that the trio of companies have no launched a new video markup. Google product manager Henry Zhang writes on the Webmaster Central Blog, “Adding schema.org video markup is just like adding any other schema.org data. Simply define an itemscope, an itemtype=”http://schema.org/VideoObject”, and make sure to set the name, description, and thumbnailURL properties. You’ll also need either the embedURL — the location of the video player — or the contentURL — the location of the video file.”
In the post, he shares an example of what a typical video player with markup might look like.
“Using schema.org markup will not affect any Video Sitemaps or mRSS feeds you’re already using,” says Zhang. “In fact, we still recommend that you also use a Video Sitemap because it alerts us of any new or updated videos faster and provides advanced functionality such as country and platform restrictions.”
“Since this means that there are now a number of ways to tell Google about your videos, choosing the right format can seem difficult,” he adds. “In order to make the video indexing process as easy as possible, we’ve put together a series of videos and articles about video indexing in our new Webmasters EDU microsite.”
The relevant section on the Schema.org site is here.