Believe It: Transcriptions Will Drive Online Video Consumption and MSNBC.com is Paving the Way

Tuesday's speech to Congress by President  Barack Obama made for a big news day at msnbc.com with some 54 million page views and 2.5 million video views, according Omniture SiteCatalyst numbers provided by msnbc.com.  (The numbers for viewing the speech are expected to be released later today.)

Four past presidential speeches to Congress, the Republican response from last night and other videos are organized in a special page called "Video Explorer."  All these videos are connected to transcriptions. 

How much incremental video views came as result of the functionality of the page is not yet known.  What is clear is the value of transcription and emerging use of voice to text technology.

Other news organizations and  video sharing sites including YouTube publishing platforms such as Delve are integrating transcriptions into their video pages. Blinkx and EveryZing use raw transcriptions to drive search functionality.   Adobe will soon integrate transcriptions into workflow.

This functionality not only provides more effective searchability by surfacing metadata, but provides viewers with the power to find and watch what they want by reading text.

Driving the integration of video and data for msnbc.com is the Atlanta-based Nexidia.

On this page, we have published the msnbc.com video of the President's speech to Congress last night.

-- Andy Plesser, Executive Producer