Scoop: Flash Video Will Have Metadata in Workflow Soon, Senior Adobe Executive Says

In what could be a watershed event for online video, Adobe Systems, the developer of the ubiquitous Flash video ecosystem, will introduce voice-to-text functionality into the workflow of Flash video production soon.  Jim Guerard, who heads all rich media at Adobe, says in this exclusive video clip, that we will see this functionality later this year.

This has huge implications for the monetization of online video as advertisers can match ads with videos effectively.  This will also mark a big evolution of video search. We have seen just the beginning of the introduction of voice-to-text, notably the recent news about YouTube and the political campaigns.

Essentially, this means that words spoken in a video will be automatically transcribed into metadata which is embedded in the Flash file.  This is done within Adobe's Flash video editing tools, Jim explains in this video.  His comments begin 25 seconds in.

Jim was a speaker at the Beet.TV online video roundtable at Stanford last month where this video was recorded.  His comments are in response to fellow panelist Charlie Tillinghast, president and publisher of msnbc.com.

-- Andy Plesser, Executive Producer