Terms of service

Playhead watches a video and answers questions about it in words, with the second of every moment it names. On request it also returns a transcript. It is reached over an HTTP API and over the Model Context Protocol.

It measures and does not interpret. Cut times, freezes, silences and pacing come back as numbers. What they mean is a judgement made by whoever reads them. Nothing the service returns is advice, and nothing it returns is guaranteed to be a correct description of a video's content. Section 6 says what that means in practice.

You must be 18 or older, or 16 and using the service with the permission of a parent or guardian. If you accept this agreement for a company, you confirm that you may bind it, and “you” then means the company.

Your account is yours to keep secure. Everything done with your credentials is done by you, until you tell us they are lost.

The right to analyse what you submit. We do not check whether you own a video, whether its licence permits analysis, or whether the platform hosting it permits automated access. You confirm you have that right, and you carry the consequences if you do not. This is the most important sentence on this page and it is here rather than at the bottom on purpose.

What that confirmation covers. For every video, link, image, file, prompt and instruction you send us, you confirm all of the following. You own it, or you hold every licence, right, consent and permission needed to submit it and to have it analysed. Everyone who appears in it, and everyone whose voice is in it, has agreed to that use of their image and voice. The music, the footage, the fonts and the trademarks in it are cleared for it. Nothing in it is unlawful where you are or where we are. And your use of the answer breaks nobody else's rights.

Your keys. An API key is a bearer credential. It works anywhere it is pasted, including places you did not paste it. We store only its hash and cannot recover one. A key that leaks is revoked and replaced, and calls made with it before revocation are yours.

What your team does. Everyone on a seat shares one credit pool, one set of keys and one history. Adding somebody gives them all of it.

A link is the ordinary way to use this service, and it is also the part of it that carries the most risk. This section says exactly where that risk sits.

What we do with a link. You give us an address. We fetch the video at that address, decode it, sample frames from it, and read those frames. We do not publish the video, we do not re-upload it to anywhere, and we do not give a copy of it to another customer. The copy we hold is a working copy, and the privacy policy says how long it lives.

What we do not do. We do not review a link before we fetch it. We cannot tell whether you made the video, whether you licensed it, or whether you are analysing a competitor without asking them. No system can tell that from an address. So the check is yours, and by sending the link you say you have made it.

The platform's own rules are yours to keep. Every video platform has terms about automated access, and they are an agreement between you and that platform rather than between you and us. You confirm that submitting the link does not break them. You also confirm that the video is lawfully accessible to you, and that reaching it needs no password you were not given, no paywall you did not pay, and no technical protection measure to be worked around.

A platform can refuse, and that is not a fault. Platforms change what they allow without notice. A link that worked yesterday can fail today. Credits held for a fetch that fails are released, and the failure is not a breach of this agreement by either side.

When the answer is a file instead. If a link cannot be used, the same video can be uploaded from your own disk. That path is always available and it is the one to use for anything you hold the rights to yourself.

You may not use Playhead to do any of the following.

• Submit material you have no right to submit, or material that breaks somebody else's copyright, trademark, image rights, voice rights, privacy or confidence.
• Submit material that is unlawful where you are, including child sexual abuse material, which is reported rather than merely refused.
• Submit sexually explicit material, material that promotes hatred or violence against a group, or material that shows extreme violence.
• Analyse a person in order to identify them, to track them, to profile them, or to build a biometric record of their face or voice.
• Use the answers to mislead. That includes presenting an answer as the words of a real person, and building a deceptive advertisement, a fraudulent scheme or a fake endorsement out of one.
• Use the service to build a substantially similar competing service, to train a competing model, or to systematically extract its outputs for either purpose.
• Attempt to reach another customer's data, probe our internal network through the URL input, or work around rate and concurrency limits.
• Scrape, crawl or spider the website, or reverse engineer the service except where the law says you may.
• Resell access without a written agreement. Analysing video on behalf of your own customers is fine and expected. Reselling the API as if it were yours is not.

We may suspend an account that is doing one of these, and we will say which one. Where the law requires it, we report instead of only refusing.

Playhead is built on machine learning models. Some run on our own machines and some belong to other companies. The privacy policy names every one of them and says what each receives. Adding one is a change to that page.

An answer can be wrong. A model writes the most likely sentence, not the true one. It can name an object that is not in the frame, read a word that is not on the screen, or place a moment at the wrong second. We work to keep that rare and we do not promise it away. Check an answer before you act on it, and check it twice before you publish it.

The measurements are a different thing from the reading. Cut times, shot lengths, silences and frame rates are measured by our own code and are reproducible. The sentences around them are written by a model. When the two disagree, the measurement is the one to trust.

Nothing here is advice. An answer is not legal, medical, financial or safety advice, whatever it sounds like. Do not use the service to decide anything about a person, such as employment, credit, housing or insurance.

An answer is not exclusive. Two customers who ask the same question about the same video can receive the same words. As between you and us, the answer is yours. We claim no ownership of it, and we cannot give you a right to stop somebody else receiving something similar.

Say that a machine wrote it. Where you publish an answer in a place that requires AI content to be labelled, labelling it is your job. The EU AI Act is the current example and it will not be the last.

Automated systems watch for abuse. We run automated checks over what is submitted, to find unlawful material, spam and attempts to break the limits. No person reads your content as part of that. No automated decision here has a legal effect on you: a suspension is decided by a person and you can ask us to look again.

If you own a video and you believe it has been analysed here without your permission, tell us and we will act. Write to hello@tryplayhead.com with the subject line “Copyright notice”.

A notice has to hold six things, or we cannot act on it:

• Your name, postal address and email address.
• The work you own. A link to it is enough if the link shows it.
• What you want removed here, named closely enough for us to find it. The video address is best. A run id or a document link also works.
• A statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not permitted by you, your agent or the law.
• A statement that the information in your notice is accurate, and that you are the owner of the work or are authorised to act for the owner.
• Your signature. An electronic one is enough.

What we do. We answer inside 5 working days. Where the notice is good we delete the cached video, the contact sheets, the transcript and the readings made from it, and we tell the customer which notice caused it. We keep the notice and our answer for 3 years, because a claim can arrive long after the file is gone.

If you think we got it wrong. A customer whose material was removed can reply with a counter notice: what was removed, why the removal is a mistake, their contact details, and their consent to the courts of the place they live. We pass it to the person who sent the notice. If that person does not go to court, we may restore the material after 10 to 14 working days.

Repeat infringers lose the account. An account that is the subject of repeated valid notices is closed. We count them, and we say so before the last one.

A notice sent in bad faith carries a cost of its own in most jurisdictions. This route is for owners and their agents.

You will defend us and cover our loss if somebody brings a claim against us because of what you sent, what you did with an answer, or because a confirmation you made in section 3 or section 4 was not true. That covers the award, the settlement and reasonable legal costs.

We will tell you about such a claim promptly, we will not settle it without asking you, and you may run the defence. This does not apply to the part of a claim caused by our own breach of this agreement. Consumers keep every right that cannot be signed away.

Each plan grants a number of credits every billing period. One credit is roughly a minute of video at the standard detail level. Finer levels cost more, and motion is billed per second because it extracts six times the frames. A repeat of a window already paid for costs 20% of the original.

Credits do not roll over. They reset each period. If you regularly finish with a large surplus, the smaller plan is the right one.

There is no overage. Running out returns an error, not an invoice. Nothing is ever charged that you did not choose.

Seats. Studio includes 5 people and each additional seat is $29 a month, adding 1,400,000 credits to the shared pool. Seats are prorated by Stripe when added or removed mid-period.

Payment is by card through Stripe, monthly or annually in advance. Annual is billed once at 25% off. Prices exclude VAT and sales tax, which is calculated at checkout.

A failed payment does not immediately end anything. Stripe retries for several days. Access changes only when the subscription actually lapses.

Cancel any time in the billing portal. The plan runs to the end of the period you have already paid for, and the credits stay usable until then. Cancelling does not confiscate the middle of a month.

If the service is materially broken for you and we cannot fix it, we refund the unused part of the current period, pro rata. Ask by email. There is no form and no argument.

Consumers in the EU and UK have a 14-day right of withdrawal, which this does not limit.

Anyone with an account can share a referral link and earn a share of what the accounts it brings in pay. The full rules cover the attribution window, the commission rate, how refunds are handled and what does not count. They are on the Refer & earn page inside the dashboard, and they are part of these terms.

Commission is reversed on refunded invoices, taken from what has not yet been paid out. We do not claw back money already sent. Attributing your own accounts to yourself does not work and voids the referral.

We aim for the service to be available, and we do not offer a contractual uptime figure on the self-serve plans. A number nobody will pay out against is worse than no number. Enterprise agreements carry a real SLA with real credits.

What we do commit to structurally: the website going down does not stop the API, and transcription going down does not fail a job. Sheets still return, with a note saying why the transcript is missing.

You keep every right in the video you submit and in the sheets and transcripts produced from it. We claim no licence in them beyond what is needed to produce and store them for you, to keep the service secure, and to answer a copyright notice.

Training is a separate answer, and you give it or you do not. Your account holds two. One is a confirmation that you may submit the material, which is required and grants nothing beyond the analysis you asked for. The other is a voluntary permission to keep that work as training material. The second one is what a dataset may ever be built from, it is off until you turn it on, and you can turn it off again at any time under Team.

A video that is not yours is never training material, whatever is ticked. You cannot license us a video you did not make, so a link you paste is analysed for you and nothing more. Your media is never published or passed on: the permission covers the annotations and your questions, never the file.

Derived artifacts are cached and content-addressed, which means two customers analysing the same public video reuse the same computation. Nothing about who analysed it is shared, and the privacy policy sets out exactly what is kept and for how long.

The service reaches other companies to do its work, and the website links to places we do not run. A model provider, a video platform, a payment page and a documentation site are all somebody else's. What happens on them follows their terms, not ours, and we are not responsible for their content or their practices.

Where such a service changes what it allows, the part of Playhead that depends on it can change with it. We tell account holders by email when that removes something they use.

The service is provided as-is. To the extent the law allows, our total liability in any 12-month period is limited to what you paid us in that period, and we are not liable for lost profits or indirect losses.

We give no warranty that an answer is accurate, complete or fit for a purpose. Section 6 says why, and it is the section this limit exists for.

Nothing here limits liability for death, personal injury, fraud, or anything else that cannot be limited by law. Consumer rights are not affected.

We can change these terms. A material change is announced by email before it takes effect, and continuing to use the service accepts it. A price change never applies to a period already paid for.

Either side can end this at any time. You cancel in the portal or delete the account outright. We would end it only for a breach of section 5, for repeated copyright notices under section 7, or by giving 30 days' notice and refunding the unused part of the period.

Sections 3, 5, 8, 13 and 15 stay in force after this agreement ends.

Maximilian Moj, Ackerhummelweg 15, 50999 Köln, Germany at hello@tryplayhead.com

See also the privacy policy.