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What good are all of the millions of hours of video assets broadcasters and entertainment companies have compiled over the years if no one can find them?
As the Web begins its transition from a predominantly text-based environment to more of a broadcast model, site designers and content providers are asking themselves this very question. At the same time, they are scrambling somewhat to come up with solutions to organize, reference and catalog the millions of hours of video likely to dominate the content side of tomorrow's Internet.
"As all things analog become digital, content becomes currency," says Carlos Montalvo, vice president of marketing for streaming audio and video indexing leader Virage, Inc. "And if you can't find it, you don't have it."
According to Nielsen NetRatings, 33 million people accessed some form of streaming content-audio or video-just in July of this year. Another measure by Internet search company Alexa Internet of the actual number of streams on the Internet found more than 2.7 billion streaming media files online in May, more than triple the number available in August 1999.
As this transition quickens, the demand for search technologies that will allow users to easily wade through the burgeoning mass of streams becomes clear. As such, numerous companies are positioning themselves to be tomorrow's leaders in streaming search technology.
First to market was Virage, a company that has provided video enabling solutions since its inception in 1995. Over that time, much of Virage's business has been in government and intelligence gathering-industry segments that rely heavily on cutting-edge recognition and indexing technologies to sort through millions and millions of gathered audio and video files from around the globe. Now, as more and more Web companies are looking to incorporate streaming audio and video into their sites, Virage has developed relationships with more than 200 unique accounts, including such high-profile customers as CNN, C-SPAN, General Motors, Nike, CNET, the New York Times, WashingtonPost.com, all of the major American television networks, and many other global information gathering companies. The company also helped create the Web's first video search engine, with AltaVista, in 1998.
"Our technology really allows the established broadcast brands ... to in essence take their long-format properties and then index them and monetize them to the clip level in a way that complements their broadcast properties and extends their brand, extends their audience," says Virage's Montalvo.
The Virage solution is called the Internet Video Application Platform, and allows companies to transform their video assets into "engaging Web experiences." Essentially, video is analyzed and catalogued using the company's SmartEncode process, which simultaneously indexes and encodes the video, transforming it into a structured video database of video "clips" that can be dynamically published to a Web site or searched on-demand. Index information is created in multiple ways-through visual scene changes, spoken words, name and face recognition of speakers, optical character recognition, and other metadata derived from highly advanced, algorithm-based analysis software. Virage's fourth generation VideoLogger then creates a searchable index based on the information developed in the encoding process.
While Virage can claim first-to-market with much of today's available streaming search technology, the sheer growth potential of streaming on the Web has meant that numerous related companies are positioning themselves to provide search solutions as well.
One company, Boston-based WordWave, is hoping to build on its global position in transcription and closed-captioning to develop technologies that will enable streaming searchability. WordWave has been the market leader for broadcast captioning and legal transcription, and recently formed a separate communications division internally to attack the streaming search market.
"Our challenge is to provide easy, intuitive access to large volumes of audio and video content," says Larry Schwartz, president of WordWave's new communications division. "(We're) taking our core competency, voice-to-text, which we've been doing in aggregate for twenty years, and applying it to the medium of streaming media. It really is a wonderful marriage for us."
By using captioning and transcription technology, WordWave hopes to achieve what it calls "granular search," where video is indexed keyword by keyword. "When you index (video) through the transcription of the dialog, it is 99 percent accurate and totally moved by the user," says WordWave president and CEO Perry Solomon. "In any e-commerce application, any application where you want real specificity, that kind of accuracy is a huge benefit."
Other companies are looking to get into the business. Taalee Inc., based in Athens, Ga., also sees streaming search solutions in a "semantic" sense. The Taalee Semantic Search is an interface where users browse a proprietary database of metadata culled from millions of hours of video, and through a blended approach of keyword search and simple querying, users can find timely, relevant streaming content.
More than just a keyword search technology, the Taalee Semantic Engine refines user's parameters by going beyond the literal tags that users define in their query. The technology goes a step further by searching for a set of associations, similar to the way the current Northern Light search engine retrieves and displays search results, and then creates a hierarchical, flat file system of results that users can more easily navigate. Through common keyword associations, Taalee's search results, in theory, provide more tailored results.
The underlying message for companies sitting on hours and hours of unused video technology is a simple one-the technology to encode, catalog and monetize those video assets is here now. Over 24 million U.S. desktops are broadband enabled, and those users are searching for streams that maximize those connections.
As Virage's Montalvo puts it, "Broadband is here ... begin exploiting your media today, because if you wait, in essence the rules will have been defined. And most likely, (they) will have been defined by your competitors."
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