Beet.TV

Multimedia Search Engine Created in Lawrence Berkeley Labs Shows Dramatic Growth

LOS ANGELES--The multimedia "playable" search engine Seeqpod has attracted 5.5 million unique monthly users over the past year, according to internal numbers provided to Beet.TV. Through affiliates and an API, that number will likely double this year, a company spokesperson told us.

The search engine technology was developed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. 

It was initially created as a means to match genes and diseases.  Researchers discovered that the they could use the system to match or search many different objects.

Seeqpod CEO Kasian Franks recognized the need for a multimedia search engine and applied it to music and video. Seeqpod’s search results, or “discovery results,” can be watched, listened to, and read.

The technology crawls and indexes videos and other multimedia in the “deep web,” including social networks. 

Check out this report in WIRED about the Seeqpod playable music festival guide.  More about the company's functionality in music search in by Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM.

Andy interviewed Kasian at OnHollywood earlier this month.

-- Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer

Vertical Search Engine Kosmix has Gone "Horizontal," Report

Kosmix, the search engine designed to organize pages around specific interests including health, travel and automobiles, can now be configured to personalize search on any topic.  The few functionality was reported this morning by Mark Hendrickson at TechCrunch.

Earlier this month, I interviewed Kosmix co-founder Anand Rajaraman.  He spoke in general terms about the new usability of the service which is reported today.

With today's news, I've reposted my interview which we originally published last week.

-- Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

With 10 Million Monthly Uniques, A New "TV Guide" for Online Video Emerges and it is Impressive....

BEVERLY HILLS -- The OVGuide indexes and highlights some 1800 episodic online video programs.  It is powered by a staff of editors and a video search technology. 

While it has operated largely under the radar, it has become quite popular.  According to Chad Cooper, editorial content manager of OVGuide, the site will have 10 million uniques this month. (These are internal numbers.)

In the interview we shot at the company's Beverly Hills offices earlier this month, Chad gives us a demo. He says the goal of the company is not just a "guide" but to become a dominant video search engine. 

The company is backed by David Bohnett. Bohnett founded GeoCities and sold it to Yahoo! for  what was said to be $260 million.  Bohnett is based nearby in Beverly Hills and is quite involved.  This could be big.  If you are a video producer -- get your show indexed on the OVGuide.  Beet.TV's listing on the guide has generated quite a lot of traffic.

There is surely a need in the marketplace for video recommendations coming from humans, not just machines.  Our friends over at NewTeeVee have launched a recommendation site for cool videos call NewTeeVee Station. 

And the granddaddy of them all, TV Guide has recently launched a very useful guide to online video, primarily focused entertainment programming.

-- Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

Delve Launches "Semantic" Video Publishing Platform

LOS ANGELES -- Yesterday at the AlwaysOn conference, the Seattle-based, enterprise video search company Pluggd, relaunched with a new name,  Delve, and as a new business. 

The company is taking its deep search and tagging system and into a full-blown video publishing company.  They are entering a somewhat mature and heavily funded sector where  it wants to compete with Brighcove and  others.

What's fascinating about the company is that it somehow tags deep metadata around videos during the encoding process.  This rich metadata will presumably help make the video more searchable and cross indexed.

For an indepth look at Delve and the sector, check out this story by Mark Henrickson in a post  yesterday on TechCrunch. 

I spoke with Alex yesterday at the Sofitel Hotel.  You might want to check out my interview Alex from last month when he spoke about the necessity for a "semantic" Web.

-- Andy Plesser

NewTeeVee Launches Video Guide

NewTeeVee, the 18-month-old video site dedicated to covering the business of online video, has expanded its franchise with a site that reviews and recommends online video content.

The new site is called NewTeeStation.  A guide to what's new and worth watching is very much needed.  And it's a field that is just now taking shape.  One big player in online video review and recommendation is OVGuide, which has reached 10 million monthly uniques.  Not sure how fast NewTeeStation will scale, but there is surely a market for this.

Good luck to Liz Shannon (above) and all the crew at NewTeeVee.

-- Andy Plesser

The "Semantic Video Web" is Essential, Pluggd's Alex Castro

Video search is key to discovery and consumption of video.  Also essential is the organization of metadata.  Pluggd, a Seattle-based start up, does both.  The company provides its enterprise solution to CNET Networks and others.

Pluggd CEO Alex Castro says that an organized system for Web video, which he calls (coined?) the Semantic Video Web is essential.

The development of a Semantic Web is a key goal of Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium. Last year I interviewed W3C chief architect Philippe Le Hegaret on the global indexing of videos. 

Also, as reported here in April, Adobe is putting metadata into video editing work flow with an eye an eventual super index of content. 

Believe it, the Semantic Video Web is on the way. 

-- Andy Plesser

New Mobile Video Search Technology "Largely Succeeds," Business Week

Veveo, a Boston area start-up has "largely succeeded" in bringing effective video search and feed management to mobile devices, says Business Week's Stephen Wildstrom in a recent review.

The company's product is called vTap.  It is a downloadable application for mobile devices. Once installed, users can search under various terms.  Feeds under specific search terms can be established.

Somehow the vTap system manages to instantly transcodes videos to play on the user's handset.  Beet.TV comes up looking very good indeed.  Too bad I can't watch videos on my BlackBerry, yet.

In September I interviewed founder Murali Aravamudan. Murali founded Northwest Venture-based Winphoria Networks, a company later sold to Motorola for $179 million in 2003.

I caught up with vTap's GM Daren Gill at Digital Hollywood earlier this month.  He explains how this works and provides a demo.

-- Andy Plesser

eBay's StumbleUpon Expands Video Universe

StumbleUpon, the platform that allows users to discover and recommend videos to others has expanded sources of videos curated into the system.  The San Francisco-start-up initially allowed users to "stumble" and collect clips from YouTube.  It expanded in recent months to include Google, MySpace and Metacafe.

Today, it added College Humor, Funny or Die, Vimeo, DailyMotion, Veoh.com and VBS.tv. 

Last September, I interviewed StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp.  I've reposted the video here.  He explains the monetization scheme for the eBay unit.  Check out the take on StumbleUpon by Liz Gannes over at NewTeeVee.

-- Andy Plesser

As the Semantic Web Develops, Videos Will Need to be Transcribed and Indexed

For online video to be searchable in the way that text is indexed on the Web today, video will have to be transcribed and indexed in the form of transcripts or raw metadata.

Not only is this critical for effective search, it will be essential in the years ahead when the Web evolves to a more organized system, like a giant library.  This is the promise of the Semantic web.

At NAB in Las Vegas las, I caught with Tom Wilde, CEO of EveryZing, the video voice-to-text company that is powering publishers with a white label solution.  Tom explains how his company "listens" and transcribes the voice track of video clips. 

Also at NAB, I interviewed Adobe's chief rich media strategist Mark Randall who explained the importance of entering metadata into video files and how this will evolve in the years ahead.

-- Andy Plesser

"Video Indexing is Key to the Future of the Web," Chief Adobe Strategist Mark Randall

The future of effectively indexed online video is "key to the future of the Web," says Adobe's Mark Randall, chief strategist at the Dynamic Media group. 

Here in Las Vegas at NAB, Adobe made a big step in this direction with the announcement of a new text to speech functionality for its editing software. 

While putting text along video is valuable to video editors, the development has significant implications for the how video will be indexed in the future, Mark explains.   In this interview, he  provides a look at how the future of indexed video will develop and the longterm approach of Adobe. 

We believe that the success of online video will come from proper indexing.  Joost is making some preliminary progress here.  Tim Berner-Lee and his team are pushing for a "semantic" web where entries have distinct locations, sort of a massive "card catalog."  This is going to happen and creating metadata as part of the video production workflow is essential, as Mark points out.

-- Andy Plesser

Video Search Optimization is Powered by Grassroot Popularity, Truveo's Pete Kocks

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For videos to be successfully found through search, they need to build a following first, says 
Pete Kocks, the president of Truveo, the San Francisco-based video search unit of AOL.

Similar to the way that text search engines track the popularity of pages and indexes them accordingly, video search engines like Truveo monitor what  is popular. The popularity of clips effects how high they place in results pages. 

Using proper metadata and correct RSS classification are important.  But building a following, as in successful blogging, is key, Pete told me in this interview conducted on Tuesday at the Beet.TV executive summit in Washington.

Pete and other leading executives in video search will gather for a summit in San Francisco next week to sort out this important area.  Great line-up. I wish Beet.TV could be there.   

Time Warner Crew at Beet.TV's Executive Summit

Below is Pete along with Sandy Malcolm, Executive Producer of CNN.com.  Both were participants at our first ever event held at the Embassy of Finland.

-- Andy Plesser

Believe It: The Semantic Web is Coming to Web Video and Joost is Leading the Way

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Tim Berners-Lee, the British physicist who invented the organizational system for the World Wide Web, has been an advocate for a more organized Web, something he calls the "semantic" Web.

This new system of organizing Web pages in a unified system, something akin to a giant Dewey Decimal system where pages have unique identifiers and can be cross referenced and linked, is coming to the world of video via Joost, which is inserting identifying tags called RDF's into the XML code. 

Earlier this month, I interview Philippe Le Hegaret, who works with Berners-Lee at the World Wide Consortium, headquartered on the the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Philippe is chief architect of domain services.

He explains the current implementation of the RDF into science research documents, new software from Oracle and in videos from Joost.

Here's what Joost's CTO Dirk-Willem van Gulik said earlier this year about RDF in Technology Review:

.......Dirk-Willem van Gulik calls "XML on steroids." RDF allowed developers to write software without worrying about widely varying content-use restrictions or national regulations, all of which could be accommodated afterwards using RDF's Semantic Web linkages.

Joost's RDF infrastructure also means that users will have wide-ranging control over the service, van Gulik adds. People will be able to program their own virtual TV networks--if an advertiser wants its own "channel," say, or an environmental group wants to bring topical content to its members--by using the powerful search and filtering ­capacity inherent in the semantic ordering of data.

How much video indexing will evolve to this "semantic" platform, is tough to say.  Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/Write Web reports that BBC is exploring the system.  This is a trend to watch in 2008.

You can grab my interview with Philippe right here.

-- Andy Plesser

 

Dabble to Sell Video Viewership Data to Publishers

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Dabble has built a video search platform around the preferences of viewers.  Founder and CEO Mary Hodder calls it "people powered search."

The company will soon provide metadata about search to publishers who need to understand why and where their clips are being watch.  If Mary can solve this, it would be a substantial business.  She told me this does not entail sharing data about individuals, just metadata, which we understand to be akin to market research results coming from Nielsen.

I caught up with her recently at the NewTeeVee conference in San Francisco where she was on a panel.

Update:  11/26:  The Wall Street Journal has a story today on how technology from a Boston area start-up company  Navic Networks is providing  viewership  data  on  Cox Cable systems for marketers.   Also, the International Herald Tribune has a story about a French company tracking IPTV viewership.

This data has a great deal of value.

-- Andy Plesser

Video Search Must Be "Universal," EveryZing's CEO Thomas Wilde Explains

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Podzinger, the Cambridge-based speech-to-text search technology company, that has been heavily funded with national security money, was renamed EveryZing about 5 months ago.

The company has been a leader in indexing podcasts and making them searchable.  Over the past several months, the company has focused on searching and indexing video.  Its business model is primarily a "white box" solution, providing search functionality to publishers, broadcasters and other content creators. 

The repositiong looks like a smart strategy as podcast search is in a sad state.  Yahoo! is set to close Yahoo! Podcast next week, reports Charlie Sullivan in Search Engine Land.  Google has said it wont provide search of podcasts for some time.

EveryZing's roots in national security and its speech to text technology is similar the Blinkx, the London-based video search firm.

Earlier this month I sat down with EveryZing CEO Thomas Wilde.  Thomas has had career in online search and explains how video search must be essentially the same as universal search and the rich text elements of video must be the basis of that search. 

-- Andy Plesser

Tafiti: Microsoft Debuts New Graphical Environment to Display and Organize Search

 

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We've been talking about Microsoft's Silverlight as a new technology for creating online video.  The other side of the technology is its use as a rich, interactive medium.  One of the more intriguing applications is its use as a graphical interface for search results.

Developers have come up with some very cool ways to show how Silverlight can make search results look compelling.  This experiment is called Tafiti.

It's not part of Microsoft Live at this point, but it could happen.

Beet.TV was up in Redmond earlier this month.  Our intrepid producer David Kavanaugh caught up with Marc Mercuri for a demonstration of Silverlight and its use in Tafiti.

-- Andy Plesser

Grab the embed of this video.

Consuming Video on Mobile is an "Impromtu Experience" Says Veveo's Murali Aravamudan

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Monday, we reported on the launch of vTap, the video search engine for mobile devices from Veveo.  This is a very cool new development.

Here is our second interview with Murali  Aravamudan, CEO and founder of the company.  Murali sees wider consumption of video on mobile devices in the U.S. following the improvement of bandwidth from the carriers with the proliferation of 3G, Wimax and WiFi.

There is a new report that the iPhone will soon work on 3G.

I asked him about the video browsing and organizing experience with mobile videos.  He explained it is quite impromptu, a process of discovery.  This is similar to the views of video search pioneer Tim Tuttle of AOL.

Grab the embed code of the video here.  Or search for it on your phone!

--- Andy Plesser

Breaking: The "Walled Garden" of Video on Mobile Phones is Smashed: Tens of Millions of Videos Play on Mobile Phones as vTap Goes Live

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Tens of millions of video clips, organized by one of the Web's "most comprehensive" video search engines, are now available on the Apple iPhone and on Microsoft Mobile-powered phones, through a thin application downloaded to a mobile browser.

vTap is an offering of Veveo, a Boston-area mobile that has received some $28 million in funding.  The company will extend the range of the phones that play videos with the upcoming release of vTap for Java-enabled phones from Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson.

Murali  Aravamudan, founder  and CEO visited the Beet.TV studios last week for a demonstration and explanation.   He told Beet.TV that the search engine has indexed "tens of millions" of videos and considers it among the most comprehensive index of videos on the Web.  (This directory is not available to the PC, just through the mobile browser)

We saw Beet.TV clips looking fantastic on a Samsung Black Pearl over the AT&T network.  To see the clips on the iPhone, a WiFi connection was helpful so we headed over to a nearby Starbucks. (Unfortunately, I can't see the clips on my Verizon 8830 BeetBerry.)

The "Garden Wall," the limited selection of video clips offered by carriers, is gone.  A few months ago, I interviewed Peter Rojos, editor of Engadget, the world's most influential blog.  Peter wondered when the walls would come down.  Well, this might be it.

vTap has been getting some good notices over the past few days from Om Malik, Rafe Needleman and Robert Scoble.  Kristen Nicole at Mashable reports on the launch this morning.

Grab the embed code of this video clip.

-- Andy Plesser

Beet.TV is Getting Slick!

Please note some snazzy new production values over here at the purple network.  We've bought some new lights and David shot this interview with two cameras.  We will have a second interview with Murali over the next few days.  Stay tuned.

Video Search is More Akin to Browsing, Truveo's Tim Tuttle Says

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Video search is different than search, it's more akin to browsing and finding interesting content:  It's largely a process of discovery.  Key to an solution is the user interface, and Truveo, the AOL search unit, has set the standard with its recent relaunch.

I was in San Francisco earlier this month to speak with Timothy Tuttle, the founder of Truveo and a pioneer in video search. This is the third and final segment of my interviews. 

Tim explains the fundamental difference in video versus text search.  And, he outlines where search will evolve.

Grab the code of this interview with Tim.

--- Andy Plesser

The Secrets of Searchable Video Revealed by Dr. Tim: RSS/XML Feeds and Rich Text Annotation Do the Trick

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Timothy Tuttle, who is the founder of Truveo, now a unti of AOL, is one of the pioneers of video search.  He recieved his doctorate at MIT while working in the Artifical Intelligence Lab.

Truveo picked a pretty nice review today in the Wall Street Journal in a column penned by Walt Mossberg's sidekick Katherine Boehret.  She writes it has the "best interface."

I caught up with Dr. Tim in his San Francisco office earlier this month.  My question was simple:  How do small content creators become more searchable on Truveo.

First thing is setting up RSS Media and XML Feeds is key and Truveo provides free tools for this.  The most fundamental aspect of successful search is accurate and extensive text annotation. 

-- Andy Plesser

Blip.TV Gets Rave Review from PC World

Congrats to Mike Hudak, Dina Kaplan and the crew at Blip.TV for grabbing the top spot in PC World's ranking of the top 200 video sharing sites. We think you guys are great and a terrific partner for Beet.TV  (Here's photo of the co-founders picking up their "Vloggie" Award last year.)

Grab the embed code, of this interview with Tim hosted by Blip.TV.

Awesome: AOL's Truveo Launches New Video Destination Page for "All the Video on the Web"

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I was in San Francisco on Monday afternoon to meet with video search pioneer Timothy Tuttle to get a preview of a very impressive new video destination site from AOL's Truveo unit.  It's based on the search and categorization platform developed Truveo a company founded by Tim in 2004 and acquired by AOL last year.

The site went live late last night.

Truveo has largely been a back-end search platform for AOL, Microsoft and hundreds of other companies.  The Truveo platform powers searches by 40 million users per month.

Tim said that after being a successful "solution," he is pleased that Truveo is now a destination.  The offering of sources is enormous -- from entertainment and news from broadcast channels, to vertical broadband video to a vast amount of user generated video.  Tim told me that the site has nearly all of YouTube has been indexed.  The aim is to  search and index "all the video on the Web," he told me.

The site allows all sorts of personalization around themes, interests and sources.  It's customizable with RSS feeds.  Breaking news is organized really well -- the videos from the Peru earthquake went up really quickly.

The videos are indexed with thumbnail images which link back to the native players with the existing in-stream ads unaffected.

There are pretty simple tools that allow content creators to be more effectively searched by Truveo. 

I love this headline from Variety:  "Mammoth Portal to Combat Google!"  Brad Stone at The New York Times calls it a "One-Stop Video Shop."   Greg Sterling says it's  "the most comprehensive video search site on the Internet."

It's pretty awesome. Here's the results for the terms "George Bush."

And, yes, the Beet.TV index looks pretty good!  It's pretty interesting to see how the purple clips are organized in channels from our video sharing sites including Blip.TV, YouTube and Google Video.

The details were just released by the company.

Grab the emed code of this interview with Tim.

-- Andy Plesser

Truveo, Tim Tuttle, AOL, Online Video

Bulletin from the Googleplex: Google to Search "All the World's Videos"

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The scope of videos found by searching Google Video has expanded in recent months from just clips on  Google Videos to include YouTube.

Since May, when the company announced the future of universal search, clips from Metacafe and Atomicfilms.com have shown up on Google Video searches.   (Industry sources, outside of Google, tell  Beet.TV that other  major  video sharing sites will be  included shortly.)

Thumbnail displays (that's me) of video images have become increasing evident on Google Video search pages. 

According to spokesman Gabriel Sticker, Google is working hard to expand the scope of its "universal search" of video.  He says that Google will search and index "all the world's videos."

He makes the point that most of the world's videos are not yet digitized, and that vast universe will be searched and organized.  So, this universal search program will be far more extensive than just effectively searching video sharing and other video sites.  Wow!   

Notwithstanding progress with video search by Google, the Web-based search of video works extremely well right now.  How's that?  If a video clip sits on a Web page that is properly maximized for Web search, the Google spiders that discover text, will deliver a page with the video. Beet.TV has very good "googlejuice" -- so our clips are found through conventional web search.

I was at the Googleplex on Tuesday for this chat with Gabriel.

Update/P.S. Thanks to John Battelle who calls the clip "worth a quick watch."

 

No Beets in the Google Garden :(

Among all the new activities on "campus," is a beautiful vegetable garden which supplies the corps of in-house chefs who feed all those clever workers.  I was disappointed to learn that they don't grow beets -- seems that most of the veggies are growing in pots and shallow beds -- not much room from root vegetables, one of the gardeners told me.    

-- Andy Plesser

Grab the emed code of this interview with Gabriel.

Gabriel Sticker, Google, Google Video, YouTube, Online Video

Forget Viral Video, It's All about Search

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Here's Fred McIntyre who heads AOL video.  He outlines the fundamentals of search and the implementation of search technology at AOL.  It a really informative interview.

Well, we all have to get our hands around effective video search.  It's key.  So, I wanted to share my article from this week's PR Week about effective online video production and search.   

Web videos are attainable for all

There's been a lot of buzz about experimentation with viral videos, dedicated YouTube channels, user-created ads, and mash-ups of all sorts.

Corporate executives are all in a lather over how to "catch the wave" of online viral videos to communicate with new audiences. There have been some successes and some monumental failures.

The real opportunity for corporate communications professionals is to make informational videos about their companies that will be seen by a targeted and growing audience.

OK, so how will these videos be seen? How can you connect the video and the audience? Although you can "push" these videos directly through e-mail or have them on a corporate site, the most powerful way to have them be discovered is through a search.

Sure, some people subscribe to RSS feeds or bookmark pages. But the fact is that most people don't wait around to refresh their browsers on the news page of a corporate site. Most discover stuff on the Web by search.

Video clips are not searchable, per se, but the text appearing on the page where the video resides is searchable. If you create a video clip on, say hair color, and place it on a page and provide descriptive commentary, Google and the other search engines will find the relevant page where your video is. Bingo, you have searchable video.

Some Web pages have more "Google juice," meaning their content is maximized and come up higher in searches. There are many search maximization tools and services.

I have found that the most effective way to make videos searchable is to put them on a blog. If a blog is updated regularly and has established cross links, searchability can be high.

The important thing is to think video. Just as you worked with text and photos and PowerPoint, you can create your own video. It's not as complicated or expensive as you might think.

Video allows many things, from providing a speaking platform for executives to video "story telling" about a new product or service. For many executives who are trained to sell and manage, video can be a very powerful communications platform.

These are not VNRs. They don't need to be slick or overproduced. They can be created entirely in-house with modest investments in equipment and training.

Making sure the light is OK and using an external microphone for good sound quality is critical.

Editing is also easy. Virtually all Windows machines have a very basic editing program called Movie Maker. Mac's have iMovie. Edited files can be uploaded to video sharing sites like YouTube, Brightcove, Blip.TV, and many others. These services create a Flash video file that can be easily placed on a Web page or blog.

Entering search terms around the clip takes a bit of technique. But don't be overly concerned with what you say, just explain what is being seen in the video on the page. I would use from 100 to 200 words in your commentary.

You will be surprised how many people will discover and watch your videos, found through a search. The tools are inexpensive and easy to use. There is no reason not to jump right in.

-- Andy Plesser

Grab this video of Fred here.

Fred McIntyre, Online Video, AOL

Thumbnails Are Huge in Video Search and Pixsy Hopes to Finger the Industry -- Google Won't Search Podcasts Until Next Year......

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Thumbnails are becoming pervasive on search results pages of Google, Ask, Yahoo! and on many customized search pages. Thumbnails had been mostly the domain of image search -- look up a celebrity under the image category and there's the photo. 

Well, it turns out that thumbnails have become a powerful way to drive traffic to video clips. This is clearly demonstrated by Google Video's recent introduction of related thumnails across the top of video player pages.

YouTube has just added some very cool thumbnails to its pages -- these images expand with a rollover of the curser.

Pixsy is a San Francisco-based start-up that has built a business around searching and organizing image thumbnails. It has found that this technology works well with video.  Now, about half of the company's indexed images are from videos. 

This make a lot of sense.  After all, many video sharing sites generate thumbnail images. Moreover, Pixsy creates millions of thumbnails. The images are found and indexed by organizing metadata, not through the more exotic methods of audio or image recognition.

Chase Norlin, CEO, was at the Beet.TV studios in steamy Manhattan this week. We spoke about thumbnails and his business. The company is not a portal, but is a provider of video and image search services to many companies. He just announced an agreement to put the Pixsy utility on eZanga. Chase says he wants his company to be the "Google of Thumbnails".

Not sure about that, but these little images are becoming a huge business.

Google Won't Search Podcasts Until Next Year

Podcasts and videopodcasts files are distributed in sort of a "hidden" universe.  One impedement to growth of the medium has been the inability of Google to search the content since the files are not "crawled."  Looks like Google won't be crawling podcasts until next year.  Check out this report on Marissa Mayer and plans at Google for various realms of search including video.  Speaking of hidden videos, I wonder when and how all the P2P content will be searched?  Search is how folks find stuff. 

-- Andy Plesser

Get the code for this video clip

Pixsy, Chase Norlin, Online Video, Thumbnails, eZanga

SEARCH, Rip, Burn Videos with RealNetworks New Player Powered by blinkx

On Tuesday, the much anticipated  and controversial new video player from RealNetworks will be released.  The player allows users to download videos in all major formats.

The videos are then organized on a desktop application.  That application has a dedicated and branded search utility provided by blinkx, the fast growing video search company.

This is a big breakthrough for the San Francisco-based blinkx, which is quickly expanding thanks to the proceeds of a successful IPO on the London Stock Exchange. blinkx says it has indexed over 12 million hours of video. 

For an interesting take in this development, read the story that was just published by London's The Independent. Here's more news about blinkx published by Search Engine Watch.

Below is a video interview I did last year with founder and CEO Suranga Chandratillake.

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-- Andy Plesser

blinkx, Suranga Chandratillake,"Online Video",RealNetworks

AOL Releases New Video Search API's, Including Analytic Tools to Understand Search

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New tools for creating search tools and analytics have just been released by Truveo, the AOL unit.

AOL bought the innovative online search technology firm last year. AOL is putting a great deal of focus and resources around search and is making Truveo a big player not just on the AOL properties, but on many websites.

Earlier this month, I spoke with AOL video chief Fred McIntyre about the importance of video search at AOL. He told me that free API's for video search are being used by over 300 developers.

Today, the company is releasing a new batch of API's including new analytic tools that track how videos are found. That's very cool. Here's the Truveo developers page.

Here's some information from the press release:   

* Rich Suite of Developer APIs - Truveo's Web APIs and developer tools are available in a variety of languages to integrate easily with a wide range of partner applications and websites.

* Industrial Strength Performance - Truveo's leading technology platform now delivers improved response time and relevance, making it ideal for powering high-traffic, performance-intensive video search applications.

* New Reporting Dashboards - Truveo's partner tools feature a new suite of reporting dashboards enabling website operators to measure and understand user traffic patterns, user engagement, popular search queries, popular video channels, as well as overall API performance.

-- Andy Plesser

"Fred McIntyre", Truveo, AOL, Online Video

Blinkx Set to Go Public -- Video Search is Hot Sector

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Blinkx, the start-up that has created a video search technology using a variety of techniques notably "listening" to audio track of video, is going public on the London Stock Exchange in May.

Blinkx was spun off from Autonomy, a company that does a good deal of government work. In fact much of Blinkx technology was developed under government security contracts to search audio for terrorist threats and other law enforcement and national security matters.

Similarly, Podzinger a video search company was spun off of BBN, a big national security contractor. Autonomy was an investor and maintained the option to take control of the company. My colleague Rafat Ali explains some of the financial issues.

I reached founder Suranga Chandratillake by e-mail for further comment, but he declined due to SEC regulations during a pre-IPO "quiet period."

Above is my interview with Suranga from last fall where he explains the imperative of search and the strategy of his company. Here is the press release from Autonomy.

-- Andy Plesser

Blinkx, Podzinger, Rafat Ali, Suranga Chandratillake, Online Video

Oh Wow: eBay to Buy StumbleUpon for $45 Million, TechCrunch Reports

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In a sign of the viability of the online video video and the multiples it can command, StumbleUpon, a small start-up that allows its users to organize and share video favorites, has agreed to be sold to eBay for $45 million, according to a report by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.

Michael says the company was funded with just $1.5 in seed money.  Wow.

Om Malik has a very interesting take on the deal.

I've posted my video interview with StumbleUpon co-founder Garrett Camp on this page.  Garrett is very nice chap from Canada who moved to San Francisco not too long ago.  Here's my original post.

I reached a company spokesperson by phone a short time ago who declined to comment on the purported acquisition, citing a policy of "not commenting on rumors."

-- Andy Plesser

eBay, StumbleUpon, Michael Arrington, TechCrunch, Om Malik, Online Video, Garrett Camp

Podzinger Crawls YouTube and Creates a New Contextual Ad Environment, a Demonstration from Alex Laats

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View a transcript of this interview

Here is the second part of my interview with Alex Laats, head of Podzinger, the division of defense contractor BBN, a Massachusetts company which is utilizing anti-terrorism technology to "listen" to the audio tracks of millions of YouTube clips. My earlier post reports on how a government-funded program has lead to an effective means to search and organize public Internet video.

In this post, Alex explains how clips are organized on Podzinger's new public portal and how this creates a valuable contextural advertising environment.

OMG, Thanks for the Link Love and the Wonderful Compliments

I am very proud of this two part series about Podzinger and I hope you found it to be interesting.  The greatest satisfaction I get from doing this blogging is the recognition I receive from my readers and fellow bloggers.  I wanted to take this opportunity to thank the recognition of my story from so many of you, members of Redit, Digg, to Tom Foremski, Techmeme, Dan Farber at ZDNet, Virginia Heffernan at The New York Times and to London's Guardian who calls Beet.TV's work "brilliance."  Wow, what can I say but thanks, and that I'm going to try to keep publishing interesting material.

-- Andy Plesser

video search, YouTube, PodZinger, Alex Laats

Exclusive: Defense Contractor has Analyzed, Transcribed and Organized 1.5 Millon YouTube Clips

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View a transcript of this interview

A major defense department contractor, BBN of Cambridge, Massachusetts, has applied a national security technology application, developed to fight terrorism, to "crawl" the audio tracks of public Internet videos through its PodZinger subsidiary. 

PodZinger has analyzed, transcribed and organized some 1.5 million YouTube clips since December and is crawling many thousand every day, according to Alex Laats, who heads the unit.

PodZinger's speech-to-text technology has evolved from its post 9/11 work on behalf of the Department of Defense and other U.S. government agencies.  Since the terrorist attacks, the company has received some $50 million in government funding. Beet.TV has learned that the technology has been used  by government agencies to analyze electronic media in part by determining if audio is in English, Arabic or Chinese. 

Similarly, PodZinger analyzes the language of clips and determines whether they are music or have speech.  If there is speech, a transcription is created which is nearly 80 percent accurate, company executives say.

BBN has retained the rights to apply this technology to search public Internet video.  It has  been seeking to monetize this business through a "white box" solution.  Selling a customized search engine for Web sites. 

It is also seeking to monetize this technology through contextual advertising. Last month, the company launched a public portal organized around various topics including sports, politics, lifestyle, etc.  It is on the public portal where much of the YouTube clips can be found.   Ads are placed around the YouTube players. PodZinger does not insert ads into the clips.

Search queries find moments within a video which match the specific search term.  When the video is found, a transcription brief of that point in the clip is displayed. 

The development of effective video search is critical to the success of online video.  BBN is not the only company in video search to bring national security work to this effort. Similarly, Blinkx, another video search technology firm has its roots in the national security work of Autonomy, a company closely associated with it.

Superstar VC Jim Breyer of Accel Partners is a board of member of BBN.  It was Accel and General Catalyst Partners who bought BBN from Verizon in 2004.

Update 3/15:  See Alex Laats demonstrating Podzinger on Beet.TV

-- Andy Plesser

video search, YouTube, PodZinger, Alex Laats

Blinkx has Video Search Deal with The New York Times

Blinkx, the video search technology that is featured in today's New York Times in an article by Jason Pontin, has an agreement to search and index videos published by The New York Times.

The company has agreements with a number of publishers and content developers to index video, including Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

As we we have reported here, Blinkx searches and indexes videos through various methods -- principally by "listening" to the audio tracks of videos.  The system also considers metadata and will soon use more visual elements in indexing video.

Effective video search is essential.  Right now, most search is indexed through meta data,the text that is uploaded along with a video and social "rankings".  What Blinkx and others are doing in this space is key.

Beet.TV has a agreement to index and our clips.  Below is the "wall" of clips from Beet.TV as indexed and organized by Blinkx.  (Please give this a few moments to load - it's very cool and worth the wait. See the funny clip of me dancing with Twyla Tharp below!)

-- Andy Plesser

(Coming Clean:  Blinkx has been an advertising sponsor of Beet.TV.  Jason Pontin is editor in chief and publisher of MIT's Technology Review, a former client of Plesser Holland, publisher of Beet.TV.)

-- Andy Plesser

Blinkx, video search, video indexing

Veotag Indexes Videos to Create "Chapters"

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There is so much video out there but it's hard find which is useful.

Companies from the large video sharing sites to new search start-ups are making video easier to find. It's a critical area for development for our industry.

Veotag has developed a technology to index videos, meaning a tool to create distinct sections of a specific video which are then defined as "chapters" with a url. The company is providing this tool to institutions and marketers.

Veotag's Scott Rhodes visited the Beet.TV studio earlier this month to explain how the technology works and its implications.

-- Andy Plesser

Veotag, Scott Rhodes, Video search

Stumbleupon Now Organizes Videos in Cool New Skin....Time Magazine's Person of the Year is "You" -- "YouTube Gurus" Loom Large in the Annual Issue

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Stumbleupon is a powerful community tool to organize preferences of Web sites around personal and group interests.  (I am pleased to say that a lot of folks stumbleupon Beet.TV, which I know from reviewing my traffic logs -- and that's great!)

It's been growing and now there are some 1.6 million registered "stumblers." Earlier this week, the company introduced a way for users to rate and organize videos from YouTube according to specific interests -- arts, sports and others.

I spoke with founder Garrett Camp in his San Francisco office about the new service.  He explains the new tool and provides a demo.

Making video searchable through community preferences is a great idea.  There is so much to sift through out there.  Another start-up, Dabble, is using peer preferences to organize specific interest videos. 

Time Magazine's Person of the Year is "You"

Ok, maybe this might seems contrived, and a cop-out by the editors, but Time Magazine's Person of the Year isn't an individual -- it's about "you" -- meaning the power of individuals to be influential.  Wow, that's pretty exciting.  It's what we've been preaching about for a while. 

The lead story in the special issue is a feature about the YouTube founders.  This is some exposure -- actually historic publicity - for Chad Hurley and Steven Chen in a story by John Cloud.

Here's my interview with Chad from this summer:

Click To Play

-- Andy Plesser

StumbleUpon, Garrett Camp, Video Search, Time Magazine, You Tube

Video Search from Outer Space: Google Earth Links to Cool Videos from Bay Area Start-up TurnHere -- William Randolph Hearst III Makes Investment.......CNET's Webshots Introduces Video Sharing

[Download video to your computer | Upload to iPod, PSP]

How is video found? Well, metadata, peer rankings, audio search, phonetics analysis and more.  But video can found through satellite photography. Yes, my friends, this is true!

Google Earth has been providing a link from its satellite images of Northern California to video clips about sightseeing destinations. These clips are produced by a company in Emeryville California called TurnHere.  The company produces terrific, short destination videos from a network of independent filmmakers. The films are guides to San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles, but the scope is expanding. I interviewed founder and CEO Brad Inman a few months back on Beet.TV. 

One big booster of TurnHere is William Randolph Hearst III who has become a private investor in the company.  In this interview, Mr. Hearst talks about TurnHere and explains how the Internet is creating entirely new opportunities to produce and syndicate video material.

From Outer Space to Your Desktop:

Here's a screen image from Google Earth of the Bay Area with little TurnHere flags where videos can be found.

CNET's Webshots Starts Video Uploading

We just saw a post about Webshots, the photo sharing site of CNET Networks, today announced the introduction of video uploading on the company's blog.  This development was first posted this morning by Marshall Kirpatrick at TechCrunch.  Interesting comments follow.

-- Andy Plesser

Google Earth, William Randolph Hearst, Brad Inman, TurnHere

Nexidia Is Pioneering Video Search Through Phonetics......Video Revolution Suits Cisco's Bottomline

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Here's our interview with Anna Convery of Nexidia. The company is a leader in analyzing speech, which it calls "speech intelligence."  The company has powerful applications already deployed in the enterprise and is now applying its technology to searching video.

It's a technology based on phonetics, meaning the sounds of the human voice.  In this second clip, Anna tells us how phonetics are used by consumers to find video clips. 

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For most of the online video universe, clips are searchable only through metadata or the text that describes a video clip.  That's OK, but it's just part of the solution.

Since video images aren't searchable yet, voice recognition and phonetic analysis software are the most practical way to find the content of the video.  Of course not all videos have words to index, but it's a critical direction. Nexidia is making important moves in this space. Other companies in this field include Podzinger and Blinkx.

CISCO'S PROFITS UP AS DEMAND FOR ROUTING GEAR FOR ONLINE VIDEO TAKES OFF....check out this AP report.  Someone's got a viable business model in this online video world! 

-- Andy Plesser

P.S.  I wish that you search experts would post your comments below.  It's a complicated subject and I can only scratch the surface of a very deep topic.

Nexidia, Anna Convery, Cisco, Online Video

AOL Video Search Chief to Content Creators: Use Rich Text Annotation to Get Clips Found

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At the Streaming Media West Conference on Tuesday, I had the good fortune to chat with keynote speaker Tim Tuttle, a pioneer in online video search. Tim founded the San Francisco-based Truveo and sold it to AOL earlier this year.  He now heads video search for AOL and is a Vice President.

Tim explained to me the approach of AOL and urges content developers to take advantage of the API's offered for free by AOL to maximize search.

I asked him which form of online video is more searchable:  Flash or downlodable files. He says it doesn't matter, but providing "rich text" or meta data is key to making video easy to find. 

-- Andy Plesser

Tim Tuttle, AOL, Truveo, Video Search, Streaming Media West

Video Search Technology is "Fuzzy," Says Blinkx Co-Founder Suranga Chandratillake

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Here's our second interview with Suranga Chandratillake, the Cambridge-trained computer scientist and co-founder of Blinkx, the San Francisco-based start-up which is doing pioneering work in video search.

Suranga speaks about the different set of skills need to solve the search on the Web.  He says the technology is not purely numbers - not "black and white" -  but "fuzzy" -- more of an art than science, and he's assembled a staff and the technology to make this all work, he tells us.

The company has raised $10 million from individuals, no venture capital.  Nice to have friends like that. 

If you didn't see our first interview with Suranga, here it is.

-- Andy Plesser

Suranga Chandratillake, Blinkx TV, Video Search, Online Video

Video Search Is About Audio -- And Blinkx is Tuning In with Spiders with Ears!

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Suranga Chandratillake, the Cambridge University-trained computer scientist and founder of Blinkx, dropped by the Beet.TV studios a few days ago to talk about his company and its solution for effective search of video. 

Unlike most video search which most commonly finds clips by the words or "metadata" surrounding video clips, Blinkx has spiders that search the audio track of millions of videos and indexes them.  Suranga tells us that since many videos don't have words, they also index metadata.

Big developments this week as Blinkx completed an agreement with Microsoft to power the video search on some parts of its MSN Internet sites and Live.com.  It's huge, Suranga told Eric Auchard of Reuters in this article:

"We will be the single biggest video search engine on the Web," Suranga Chandratillake, Blinkx co-founder and chief technology officer, said in an interview (with Reuters).

They just introduced a functionality to allow visitors to "surf video" on the web.

We've been spending some time on the site and it's interesting to spend time searching videos.  Seems like a very powerful tool.  (Just watch what you say, the spiders are listening!)

YouTube Co-Founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, Announce Sale to Google and "Coronation"

These guys are seem kind of stoked.  Chad refers to the deal as a coronation....says it's about the joining of the "two kings" -- Google and YouTube.  Can someone call the corporate communications office, pronto!  (Hey, congrats guys, must be some feeling.)

-- Andy Plesser

Suranga Chandratillake, Blinkx TV, Microsoft, Video Search, Metadata, YouTube, Reuters

Superstar VC Roger McNamee Says Effective Search is the Imperative for Online Video

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Superstar venture capitalist Roger McNamee was on the campus of MIT for the Emerging Technologies Conference where he gave an extraordinary keynote address on the importance of media and entertainment as a dynamic area for innovation and for investment.

His presentation was followed by a question and answer session with Jason Pontin, editor in chief of Technology Review.  The audio file will be posted in a couple of days on the Technology Review site.

Roger is with Elevation Partners, the Menlo Park-based VC fund. Bono is one of his partners. The fund recently made a major investment in Forbes. 

I spoke with him about his views on consumer-generated content.  Turns out he’s a fan of YouTube and watches a bunch of clips including Keith Olbermann, and many random favorites including panda bear clips.  He thinks search is the next big challenge for online video.

Looks like a lot of folks at Forbes are checking out YouTube -- particulary with CEO Chad Hurley on the cover of the new issue. Great article. Also, check out my interview with Chad from July on Beet.TV

-- Andy Plesser

MIT, Roger McNamee, Emerging Technologies Conference, Jason Pontin, YouTube

Dabble Looks "del.icio.us" To Us......

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Dabble provides individuals with the ability to create and share preferred "playlists" of all sorts of videos from many sources. 

The Berkeley-based company doesn't host or publish video clips, it just indexes them according to the interest of viewers.  These "favorites" can then be shared with others.  I think it's a cool way to organize and find video clips from so many different sources as organized by others.   I guess you could say it's a little del.icio.us-like?

Mary Hodder, founder and CEO gives us a great explanation of the utility along with a demonstration.

Bambi Rules! - Bambi Francisco, the wonderful columnist, blogger and budding televison star with Marketwatch, publishes great coverage of the whole new world of social networking and online video.  She was the first to report on the potential sale of Facebook to Yahoo!  Way to go Bambi!

ScobleShow to Debut on Monday! - Robert's show is going to launch on Monday. Here's a little teaser -- lookin' good, Robert!

Congratulations Matt Marshall - Matt has launched a superb called blog called VentureBeat, about technology and venture capital.  He is one hard working dude who knows his material.  Matt's is one of the best business journalists we know -- and a really nice guy.  He worked for years at the Wall Street Journal Europe in Germany then at the San Jose Mercury News.  He's authored a book on Germany's central bank for goodness sakes, so he can certainly unravel the venture world.  Go Matt, go!  Tell it like it is! VC Alert: Watch out for Matt on Sand Hill Road -- don't get crushed :)

You should check out Matt's piece on an interesting start-up in the Bay Area called MeeVee.

-- Andy Plesser

Mary Hodder, Dabble, Online Video, Social Networking

Motionbox’s New “Tagging” of Video Scenes is "Flickr-Like"

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You should check out Motionbox.  It’s a new site for video uploads and sharing.  The clips are an interesting mix of content – some cool independent filmmakers and lots of funky videos uploaded from mobile devices.

What is unique about the site is that it allows uploaded video to be catalogued by scene. For example, you can upload your hour-long beach vacation and create an index to specific scenes so your friends don't have to sit through the whole thing to find the sunset.   

For the content developer, Motionbox has the functionality to actually tag individual scenes and create distinct urls for each clip, sort of in the way that Flickr creates a distinct url for individual photos in collections.  The tags are searchable within the Motionbox network, but they will soon be maximized for blog and general search engines.

The company announced many of these new tools yesterday.  Earlier this month, they closed on $4.2 million in venture funding.

CEO Chris O'Brien visited us today and explained how Motionbox works, complete with a demo of the site. To get more information, you should check out the company blog.

Do You Know the Way to San Jose? - Beet.TV Is Going West! - I am very pleased to say that Beet.TV has been named the Official Vlog of Streaming Video West in San Jose.  What does official really mean?  Not sure, but we will be publishing some great interviews with speakers before, during and after the conference.  So, if you can't make it to the Valley, please keep an eye on Beet.TV.

Chris O'Brien will be a speaker at the show. And hey, I'll be a speaker too -- on a panel moderated by CNET's Molly Wood with Robert Scoble, Bob Fogerty and Josh Owens. Should be great.

Commercials Find New Life on Web - reports New York Times media reporter Julie Bosman in Thursday's Advertsing Column -- interesting to read how commercials have become viral through YouTube and Google Video. 

-- Andy Plesser

Chris O'Brien, Motionbox, Tagging, Flickr, Video Search

Technorati Is Set to Index Video, Says Chair Peter Hirshberg -- And Microformats Loom Large

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To me the most important implication of this whole online video revolution is that video clips can be effectively indexed and searched. This is one of the most exciting aspects of Beet.TV.

Many visitors first find Beet.TV clips through search -- from Technorati, Google, Yahoo! and other search and indexing sites.  Most new visitors come to view a specific post that is relevant to his or her search. 

I guess you could say that video consumption is non-linear, people don't tune into a "show" but watch what is relevant to them.  At least, that's the we way we see it.

I spoke with Technorati Chairman and CMO Peter Hirshberg in Palo Alto earlier this summer about the searchability of online video. He told me the company is putting a great deal of effort around this.  It recently introduced a most popular video page.  This page indexes the most blogged about videos on YouTube.  Before too long, clips on other video sites will be tracked, I suspect.

The next step at Technorati in making video more searchable is technology called Microformats which is being implemented with a few content producers. Technorati has taken the lead in developing Microformats.  More on Microformats. Stay tuned.

-- Andy Plesser

The Economist Harshes on YouTube

The ever insightful Economist magazine has a tough story "The Trouble with YouTube" -- says its founders Chad Hurley and Steven Chen are "casting around for a business model."  The venerable weekly reports industry rumors that YouTube is losing as much as $500,000 per month.

Facebook "Facelift" Gettting Mixed Reviews

Facebook implemented a major redesign this week and it's getting some pretty tough reviews from college kids including my son Benjamin, a senior at Dartmouth.  He finds it clunky and way too invasive.  He's not alone.  The chatter in the blogosphere is fairly negative.  Slashdot says it's creating an "uproar" among its users.  Why tinker with success? We wonder.  See our interview with co founder Chris Hughes from earlier this summer.

Online Video, Searchable Video, Technorati, YouTube, Peter Hirshberg

Where's the Money in Online Video? It’s About Advertising Placed on Searchable Video Clips, Predicts PodTech Founder John Furrier

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John Furrier is the most successful player in the commercial podcast space. He has created top notch podcasts for a number of leading tech companies. Now, he’s working with audio and video producers to build a large inventory of radio and video content. John expects to monetize all this through advertising.

During his interview he told me that video search is the key to this. Folks will search what they want and advertisers will place ads around that content.

His company PodTech has been well funded by top-tier VC’s to the tune of $5.5 million. And, as first reported here on Beet.TV, he’s recruited Robert Scoble to join his growing enterprise.

We caught up with John at the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford last month. It was great to get his take on the industry and where PodTech is going. John told me how astonished he is by the explosion in online video and that PodTech is moving quickly in the video space.

Also at the conference, we spoke with Scoble who told us a little about plans for his upcoming television show on PodTech.

Check out this Video of Kara Swisher, Chad Hurley and Others.....

Speaking of AlwaysOn, there is some great online video of the conference. You should check out this panel on community generated content moderated by Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal with panelists David Goldberg, Head of Yahoo! Music, Michael Robertson, CEO, MP3Tunes, Chad Hurley, CEO, YouTube and Michael Arrieta, Senior VP, Sony Pictures

-- Andy Plesser

Rumor or Fact?  Amazon Getting into Online Video with New "Store"???

Just read an interesting story on CNET about rumors about Amazon's efforts video with some sort of new e-commerce play.  Worth keeping an eye on this.

YouTube Cracks Internet Top-50 - We hear so much about the popularity of YouTube that it's hard to believe the site only JUST became one of the top-50 sites on the  Internet. 

Attention Video Bloggers -- and those aspiring to our noble cause, it's worthwhile to join the Yahoo! videoblogging group.

Interesting Piece in Sunday's New York Times Week in Review about the "YouTube Election"  -- check it out.

John Furrier, PodTech, Online Video Advertising, AlwaysOn

TV Programming is So Totally Non-Linear, Says CNET's Joe Gillespie

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To us, watching video on the computer or cable isn't about waiting around to see a "show." It's all about finding video that is searchable and available on demand.

Joe Gillespsie, who ran the now defunct TechTV for six years before moving to CNET where he oversees the very cool new CNETTV.com, tells Beet.TV how impossible it was to program a 24 hour linear cable channel about technology. Technology programming works best in an "on demand environment." He says the new functionality of video on demand on cable systems will provide a huge audience for CNET programming.

We think it's very important that trailblazing publishers of video content like CNET are focused on delivering content to both the desktop and the plasma screen.  After all, much of the Web's video will migrate to television.  It will be interesting to see who gets there first.

-- Andy Plesser

Coming Clean:  CNET Networks is a longtime client of Plesser Holland, publisher of Beet.TV

Speaking of Tech TV -- There's been some talk recently about its former anchors reviving the channel as a sort of online technology channel under a new name.

Next Battle of Web Censorship in China:  Online Video -- It will be interesting to see how Web sensors deal with the explosion of online video in China.  The issue is starting to heat up.

College Humor is No Laughing Matter -- Barry Diller's IAC ponies up to buy controlling interest of CollegeHumor.com

YouTube Goes Down for Six Hours -- It's incredible that tiny YouTube serves over 100 million downloads a day  -- so it's not suprising that they experienced their first "unplanned" outage.  It lasted about six hours. 

Joe Gillespie, CNET, Technology, Television, Online Video, YouTube

Top Online Video Analyst Brian Haven Unlocks the Mysteries of Video Search

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Unlike text or images, which can be easily searched, searching video is not that simple because search engines don’t “see” video images. Instead, the crawlers essentially find words like “skate boarding” or “Katrina” that producers put around their content when they upload it to YouTube, Google, etc. This is called “metadata.”

Lots of video is found “virally,” through word of mouth. Others are found in “context” – meaning you search for video and stumble across another video in the same context, or find a video through a community rating and reviews system and videos bubble up to the top of lists.

Thing is, it’s all sort of decentralized with YouTube and Google Video searching for video on their own platforms, but not across the Web.

Earlier this month, however, AOL announced a new video search engine to “find all the uploaded video” on the Web. We spoke with AOL’s Fred McIntyre about the new portal a couple of weeks ago.

To make sense of all this and to see where online video search might be going, we visited the Cambridge, Mass offices of Forrester Research where we met online video analyst Brian Haven. Brian lays it all out for us.

-- Andy Plesser

Coming Clean: Forrester Research is a former client of Plesser Holland, publisher of Beet.TV

MySpace Cinema? We read with interest this morning about the plans for MySpace to sell video download of films distributed by News Corp, the corporate owner of MySpace. We wonder if the commercialization of MySpace will spoil the party? A couple of months ago we asked Ken Auletta, author and media reporter for The New Yorker, this very question.

Google Makes Nice to the Media: Excellent article by Kevin Delaney of the Wall Street Journal about how Google is working more closely with media companies in doing content deals. (Subscription)

Katrina Stories On YouTube: Incredible collection of consumer generated videos on YouTube. We understand that there are at least 900 separate video uploads relating to Hurricane Katrina.

Brian Haven, Forrester Research, Video Search

BIG ONLINE VIDEO SEARCH NEWS: AOL Launches "Single Source for All the Video on the Web"

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Earlier this morning, AOL launched its video portal, called AOL Video. There is an incredible amount of content organized on the site. 

We at Beet.TV are very interested in search. Earlier in the week we spoke with Fred McIntyre, VP of AOL Video, about the search utility of the site. We think that providing universal search of videos across various sources from YouTube to Google to the TV networks is incredibly important. Sounds to us that they've made a big step forward. 

Fred told Beet.TV that that AOL has created a single source for all video on the Web.

Here's a partial transcript of his comments in his interview with Beet.TV

Very simply put, with the launch of AOL video, what we are focused on doing is creating a single source for all videos on the web... if it's out there, well find it. This is a place where we are aggregating and indexing video from any source imaginable on the web, whether its YouYube or Google or CBS or NBC...." Fred McIntyre, VP, AOL Video

Here's an interesting article about the new plans published earlier this week in CRN, and here's the press release about the new video initiative that was released on Monday.

-- Andy Plesser

>> Amateur Advertisers: The New York Times reports on ad agencies embracing consumer created advertising with tools like online video.

Online Video, AOL, Fred McIntyre

Jason Pontin, editor in chief of MIT’s Technology Review, explains one of the most important aspects on online video: searchability

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The Beet was in Beantown and stopped in to query Jason Pontin, editor in chief of MIT’s Technology Review, about searchable video in his Cambridge office.  The feature, says Jason, means search has moved beyond the realm of text and into image, thanks to the use of meta tags, ala Flickr.  Anyone – content creator, viewer, marketer – can imbed in the image and then find in a search.  This feature has revolutionized video on the web, particularly with the explosive growth of Google Video, which was launched in the second half of 2005, and when iTunes began selling videocasts of TV shows.

LeeAnn Prescott, at iMedia Connection shares some compelling statistics about video search and hypothesizes where it might be going in 2006:

“Higher broadband penetration and smarter devices like video phones and video iPods mean there will be a greater demand for searchable video content in 2006.  From October 2005 to December 2005, visits to Google Video increased by 169 percent, and visits to upstart video search service YouTube shot up 873 percent, mainly due to a video of a Saturday Night Live skit called "Lazy Sunday" that aired in December.   Yahoo! Video Search remains the leader among video search services, and its market share of visits grew by a more modest 18 percent in the October - December period.” “Lazy Sunday” tipped, in the words of the Tipping Point, and it clearly illustrates the inherent power of video to drive traffic and create buzz for a website or company.

(Technology Review is a client of Plesser Holland, publisher of Beet.TV).
 

Tagging, Video Search, Online Video, Jason Pontin, YouTube