Beet.TV Transcripts

Brightcove Says Quality Comes from Locally Encoded Flash: New ABC Video Player is Awesome

Sanjay Desai, On2 Technologies

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[Start of Audio]

Andy Plesser: Sanjay, tell us about The Publish Pod and why you guys did it and some of the utility there.

Sanjay Desai: Sure. The Publish Pod is a desktop application that we released about three months ago and it allows you to do a couple of things. One is to take a Flash video file and upload it into Bright Cove and you can actually batch several files, one after another and have them upload consecutively. The second, which is an interesting and new capability is to take files, video files that are not in a Flash format and have those both encoded and then uploaded directly into Bright Cove, all with The Publish Pod.

One of the ways that we trade off quality versus performance is to look at novel and innovative ways to actually deliver the technology that provided that quality. So one of the approaches we’re thinking hard about now is to actually look at the load of the video and to limit the amount of – the amount of images that are actually loaded in that initial set, such that the entire process actually becomes quicker and a better experience for the viewer.

Andy Plesser: You know, we’ve been talking about Flash 8 and of course that’s what you guys use and it looks so good. How come it looks so good?

Sanjay Desai: That’s right. Well, that’s again where On2 provides a lot of value. The video compression technology that’s inside the Publish Pod actually allows the encoding to be done at a high quality. And that’s the video that you see that comes out at the other side. We think is one that stands out from the competition in terms of the quality of the video.

On2 actually provides a couple of unique elements. One is on the encoding side of the business, as we’ve talked about, the video compression technology is part of our Publish Pod and allows folks to take files from any format and convert them into Flash video. The second piece where On2 provides value is through their Flicks Pro editing tool which allows a lot of our larger publishers to be able to edit their video and then directly upload that content into the Bright Cove service.

We have a very close relationship with Adobe and have continued to migrate as they have from Flash 7 to Flash 8 and now Flash 9 you’ll see become stronger and stronger in the marketplace.

I think we’re moving towards a world where again the picture quality will continue to improve and the interactivity between the video and the consumer will continue to improve as well.

We’ve focused on providing the highest quality experience that you can find and you’ll see our video, as compared to other sites, tends to rank very highly on that end of the spectrum. What we’re looking to do is also optimize performance. So find that nice balance between providing high quality, but also doing it in a way that allows the consumer to have a really good experience and for the video to load quickly and to play well.

My name is Sanjay Desai. I’m a director of product marketing here at Bright Cove.

[End of Audio]

On2 Technologies, Brightcove, Flash Video

WashPost Online Exec Editor: Journalists Have No Choice but to Change and to Promote Their Work

Jim Brady, Executive Editor, washingtonpost.com

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[Start of Audio]

Jim Brady: We saw back in the late 90’s that or suspected that video, once connection speeds really improved and people had high speed at home and at work and that the art form was a little better forum that people would watch a video on the Web. And so we started throwing resources at this back in ’99. I think we hired our first video journalist.

And we just kept refining the craft over time. It got enough traffic that we felt like we could continue on. It wasn’t getting huge amounts of traffic, but again, we felt like this was something we were preparing for that day in which suddenly people were willing to watch a video.

And I think over the last three years, a combination of YouTube, a combination of video iPod and just better connection speeds – suddenly one day, people will seem to be willing to watch a lot of video. And it was odd for a lot of us who have been doing this for a while that it seemed to happen so quickly that it went from some people watch video to everybody’s willing to watch some video.

Andy Plesser: Tell us about the scope of the video that you’re producing.

Jim Brady: We do some that’s purely news video. A Bush press conference, just something we think enhances a news story and gives somebody some depth. We obviously do some documentary video where we send one of the six or seven video journalists we have somewhere in the city, somewhere in the country, somewhere in the world to chase a story on our own; sometimes with a post reporter.

Reporter video is kind of a third category where we give the reporters themselves cameras and ask them to shoot video that helps to kind of enhance a story or add another dimension.

Andy Plesser: We’ve heard a lot about the changes in the world of journalism and newspapers and the imperative for journalists to change, to learn new multimedia skills. What are your thoughts on that?

Jim Brady: To answer the question about journalists and transitioning into the world, there are two answers. One, it’s hard. And two, they have to figure out how to do it; that the world is changing, how people consume media is changing by the day and we can’t, as journalists, sit back and say this is how we’ve done it. This is how we’ve done it for the last 10, 20, 30 years and that’s the way we’re going to keep doing it because our consumers are completely changing how they get to what we produce. And getting yourself out there in as many places as you can and making sure people understand what you’re doing is important. So if you’re out covering a story and you go on MSNBC for two or three minutes; you do a spot on Washington Post Radio, come on here and answer questions from readers for an hour. That does all cut into your schedule in figuring out how to juggle that is complicated.

But we, like every other major media company in the world now are fighting for the attention of every reader. And how are we going to make sure that they know what we’re doing and in some cases, getting on and talking about what you’re doing is more important now that it’s ever been; especially as we try to attract a national and international audience. So I think the challenge is definitely there but I don’t think we have any choice but to figure out how to juggle our schedules and help them produce better journalism.

[End of Audio]

Washington Post, Public Relations

WashingtonPost.com Exec Editor Mulls YouTube for Video Distribution: The New York Times Grabs Smart Dartmouth Grad for New Blog

Jim Brady, Executive Editor, washingtonpost.com

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[Start of Audio]

Andy Plesser: Some newspapers are beginning to solicit video from their readers, actually, or users or whatever you want to call them. What are your thoughts about soliciting and using video from your readers?

Jim Brady: Well, I don’t think there’s any question we will get into that and pick our spots in doing it. It may be around the cherry blossoms, it may be around the Redskins. It may be around, protests downtown. I don’t know what it will be about but we definitely want to get citizen video or citizen submissions in certain areas. We’ll probably be getting into that in the next couple of months.

But I think it’s a part of every site. I don’t think – it’s never going to be the dominant thing that WashingtonPost.com is but what we really focused on a lot of the reader engagement; providing all sorts of forums for readers to talk to us whether it’s through comments on articles or live discussions or making it easy to send email to reporters. Actually providing access on our own pages to ____ blogs that are writing about our articles. We feel like that’s something we’ve done really well, which is give people an opportunity to go deeper than just what we wrote. Write about it yourself. See what other people are writing about it. Contact the reports.

Andy Plesser: So the Washington Post has had video for a long time. You guys have sort of retweaked the home page by bringing video onto the home page in a very prominent way. Tell us a little bit about your thoughts behind that development.

Jim Brady: We brought video to the new homepage primarily because we needed to really signal the people that this was the central part of the site, that over the past couple of years, we’ve continually heard in focus groups and in other places ‘I didn’t realize you guys did video’. So a lot of the reason we’re doing this is we really need people to see that we do it. We need to get them into video and we need to get them to watch more video which is obviously good for us from a business perspective.

But when we tested this homepage out on people over the last couple of months, the one thing everybody noticed because we had that big multimedia strip on the home page, and some people said, ‘oh, I probably wouldn’t click on things in there’ but they all saw it. And I think that was a key for us because it really – this homepage signals better than anyone we’ve had what we’re about if we’re focusing on a couple of core items and making sure people can find them on the home page.

And with the Braco player on top of that, it’s now an opportunity to drive people into vide and then once they’re in video, we’ve presented them with a much better experience and a much better chance to go to more videos. So we think there will be a pretty significant impact on traffic.

Andy Plesser: Jim, let me ask you, most people experience the videos – well, let me just ask you about how the video is watched and where it’s watched. I assume it’s pretty much watched on the WashingtonPost.com. Will you have that content syndicated? Will it be downloadable? Tell us a little bit about how folks experience now or might experience these video clips beyond the confines of the WashingtonPost.com.

Jim Brady: If you look at kind of the phases we go through with video right now, and Travis comes back with this piece from Chad, we blow it out for like three days on the site.

But after a week, 10 days, that story still resonates and is still as powerful as it was the day we launched it but it’s been pushed out of the way by all these new things we’ve put up on the site since then, whether it’s the 100 stories we get from the newspaper every day or more multimedia projects we do.

So at some point, promoting a piece like that on the site aggressively becomes a lot more complicated so why not, when that second phase hits, not turn it around and say, let’s put this up on YouTube or let’s make ____ embeddable somewhere. Let’s figure out how to get this on as many platforms as we can now to give it a second life, for lack of a better term.

In terms of video podcasting, we do a ton of video podcasting. We literally bought the video iPod the day it came out and had our first video podcast out 24 hours later. So we embraced it quickly. And we actually have more people downloading video now via video podcast than we have watching video on the site. And so it’s been huge uptick for us.

Now, that’s apples to oranges because all we know is they’ve downloaded it. We don’t know that they watched it. We know people on the site watch the video. So I’m not saying more people watch video on iPod than on the site but the fact that that many people are downloading it is great for us. And so we’re going to continue to explore any avenue we can to get our video content out there, whether it’s an Apple Set-Top Box or whether it’s working with broadcast organizations to try to get stuff on network TV. We’ve done some stuff with Frontline in the past and some stuff with local TV.

So there’s no platform that we would not be willing to put our video.

[End of Audio]

Washington Post, YouTube, Online Video, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,

Hearst is Transforming Online Video and Itself with Smart Investing in MobiTV, Slingbox, Brightcove and the NewsMarket

Michael Dunn, Vice President, Hearst Interactive Media

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[Start  of Audio]

Michael Dunn: My interest dates way back pre-blogging, just from an online, rich media perspective. The thing that really resonated with me is when RSS2.0 with enclosures became capable, and then publicized through Adam Curry and Dave Winer and blossomed into early stage podcasting.

I created my blog, which is nomadicaudio.com, within a few days of hearing the first – what weren’t even called podcasts at that point.

Andy Plesser: So, Michael, there’s a lot of emerging forms of video blogging coming up. What do you think is the best form to you? Is there one form? How should video be distributed?

Michael Dunn: I think you need to put it out in every format. If you look at what Andrew’s doing at Rocketboom; he makes sure he puts out everything from HD to just view it on his website in flash.

Andy Plesser: Hurst is both a very old media company and a new media company. How does – how does the company evolve and where might it be going, and what’s happening on the division level?

Michael Dunn: Sure. Hurst is made up of a newspaper division, magazine division, broadcast division – that’s Hurst-Argyle – it’s a public company, and business media division, digital media, focused; probably the earliest group that was focused on digital media because their asset was digital, and entertainment, as you mentioned, so ownership and ESPN, AME and so on.

Each of our core divisions has been looking at digital media strategies for a while, and so each of them is entering into it. Newspapers has a very big initiative underway; so does magazines, and from a venture side, which is a group I work in; I work in a venture and technology group that’s at a corporate level.

We look to make investments in companies that can do two things, provide economic return on the investment and also provide new knowledge that we bring into the company, so by investing in an innovative startup company like a Brightcove, we’re going to hopefully both gain economically, but also gain from a perspective of understanding.

Andy Plesser: How do you figure out what to invest in, and what kind of companies are you investing in now?

Michael Dunn: They tend to be companies that don’t fit into one of our traditional divisions, so we’re not gonna get involved in buying a new newspaper or a new TV station or acquisition of a magazine property. We already have businesses that do that naturally.

We look at areas that are on the edge of those divisions, so they’re media-related. We look at them for two basic reasons; financial return to the company and key learning from being involved with those companies, especially early companies as they’re looking at emerging business models.

Andy Plesser: Yeah, why don’t you give us a little bit of rundown on some of the portfolio companies and who they are?

Michael Dunn: Gather is a social network site. Sphere is a blogsphere servicing company. The NewsMarket is a video services company. MobiTV is a mobile TV offering. Brightcove is a digital or Internet TV offering. Sling Media is a different way to consume TV through the network. Pandora’s an online music-sharing site, and Light Orbit is a broadcasting industry services company.

[End of Audio]

Hearst Interactive Media, Micheal Dunn, Wireless Video, Mobile Video, Online Video

GigaOM's NewTeeVee Relaunched with Expandable Video Players -- Traffic Is Doubling Monthly at the Essential Industry Blog

Om Malik, Founder, GigaOM; NewTeeVee and Liz Gannes, NewTeeVee

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[Start  of Audio]

David Kavanaugh: Hi. So we’re here in San Francisco, a place that many would say is the mecca for the online media revolution. Today we have the privilege of meeting with some of the minds behind newteevee which is an exciting new blog about online video.

Om Malik: So we basically had started the site in December and initially it mimicked the look and feel of GigaOM and the reason for that was that we weren’t very sure if it was going to stick.

Three months into the new site, we realized that it was a different audience, right? It wasn’t my classic GigaOM audience. It was very different from what my typical readers were.

Liz Gannes: Maybe ____ for changing the design of our site was to better reflect our subject matter and also just to be attention grabbing and catchy and make you actually want to click through to our site where a lot of the action happens hopefully in the comments and in the video surrounding the posts.

David Kavanaugh: Liz is the creative force behind the web page’s new look.

Liz Gannes: We had a really great designer come in and turn this into something visual. And if you go to the top of the page, over in our new video bar, I’ll show you this video, a special episode of Ask a Ninja in which the ninja sneaks on to some kind of press junket for Blades of Glory, the new Will Ferrell movie and interviews Will Ferrell and his costar, in character as the ninja. Well, of course, the ninja’s always in character. And they have a pretty funny discussion which includes, as usual, the ninja telling them that he looked forward to killing them.

David Kavanaugh: What sort of model do you guys use to find out who’s looking at your site?

Liz Gannes: We get emails. We get comments. Sometimes we specifically solicit feedback. We definitely try to respond and foster some kind of a community on the site rather than just an audience.

David Kavanaugh: So, yeah. I think that the online publications, they really have an upper hand over the other formats because you can get really good feedback from your viewers?

Liz Gannes: Yeah. So it’s a particular skill to foster feedback, I think, and one that I’m striving to have. But to be open and engaging and approachable in a way that people feel like they’re invited to offer their opinion. And it’s been fun to see that develop as the site goes on because when someone comes to a site and say last December, there are no archives, there’s very little kind of site identity, it probably took a lot more to step in and say here’s what I think. But now we have kind of a regular gang of commenter’s. Schlo-mo’s always ready to step up and criticize someone for self-promoting in the comments which is really nice so we don’t have to go do that ourselves.

And this guy, Nat, is always ready to jump in with some kind of insider view on the P to P industry and keep us in check if we forget to mention something. So it’s nice to have an idea of who’s out there and who’s contributing and include them as members of the site.

Om Malik: I mean, that’s the beauty of the Web is like you can walk with your audience and our readers are basically the reason this Web site redesign happened. And I hope people are liking it, you know?

Liz Gannes: Om was just telling me inside that he was just looking over our traffic stats and we’ve doubled our number of visitors every month that we’ve existed.

[End of Audio]

Om Malik, Liz Gannes, Online Video, NewTeeVee

As Newspapers Gear up with Online Video Reporting: the Wall Street Journal is Set

Bob Leverone, WSJ.com

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[Start of Audio]

Bob Leverone: Let’s take a look around a little bit of our video facility here. We came down to this space here, eeew, almost a year ago and the whole point here – well, a little over a year ago actually, and – was to go into the Dow Jones newsroom here, in this case the online newsroom, and really become a part of the whole online process here at Dow Jones. What we have in here is an editing suite. In this case we have both an avid editing facility, also a Macintosh Suite with Final Cut Pro on it. Again, you see the Macintosh computers. We’ve really adopted that as a standard in our editing, so we can have a number of people working with desktop editing, and we’ve found it to be very effective, particularly in the broadband area.

The Wall Street Journal reporter is now being gradually equipped with cameras, and those cameras, some are mini DV’s and sometimes they’ll send us the tape. Other times they will do FTP, yes. If you’ve seen any of Walt Mossberg’s videos, which have been very effective for us, he does those directly through his Macintosh, the camera on his Macintosh computer, and he FTP’s them to us. This is a – actually a very highly equipped television studio. It’s all completely digital through and through. It was custom designed for this space. And this is particularly interesting, these small Sony cameras, which are really becoming state of the art now in a lot of broadband situations, because they are small.

They can be controlled through a normal control unit, remote control, and they have a – really a full range of operation with 3CCD technology, which enables you to do what you had to do with a $50,000.00 broadcast camera even just a couple years ago. And that’s our video production facility. I’m Bob Leverone, Dow Jones Online appearing here on Beat TV.

[End of Audio]

Dow Jones , Bob Leverone,  The Wall Street Journal, Online Video Journalism, Bill Grueskin

YouTube to Present Video Awards as More Producers Use YouTube as Distribution Platform Including Trailblazing TurnHere...Beet.TV Holds First Networking Shindig in NYC on Weds!

Brad Inman, TurnHere

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[Start of Audio]

Brad Inman: I started out as a freelance writer and I remember I got my first important gig that was semi-permanent as an independent contractor or freelance writer was with the L.A. Times to write a column four times a month, $200.00 a week, and that was the difference between me getting by and not getting by.

So my experience professionally for 20 years has been organizing freelancers and so from a business standpoint what I saw was this incredible network of very talented filmmakers who were waiting in line for the next big shoot on television and in between were waiting tables or they were being told upload your stuff for free and maybe you’ll make some money, and having been a freelancer, we said, “No, we’re gonna pay filmmakers. We’re gonna pay them the going wage and we’re gonna try to keep them regularly busy with more and more work.”

Andy Plesser: So, Brad, since the last time you appeared on Beat TV, you’ve taken on some new corporate clients. My question is, “Have you adapted the Turn Here style to the realm of industrial corporate videos?”

Brad Inman: Our corporate work is not a big part of our work but as an example, Intercontinental Hotel. They came to the conclusion that, you know, one big major television ad that says the same thing over and over again, shooting at us, you know, through the television waves over and over and over again was work but the Internet was about search, useful information. At the same time, they wanted to extend their brand into this new medium.

So they came to us and said, “We’d like to shoot some videos, we think, of our hotels in locations around the world.” They have 140 of them. And we said, you know, “What if we use the Turn Here style and took your concierge in the cities – whether it’s Singapore or Berlin or Santiago, Chile – let’s take them and have them give us a tour of not the hotel – everyone’s got thousand-count sheets but, you know, where’s the good places to eat? Where’s the good places to go out? What are some things you gotta see around the city where the hotel is located?”

So we used the concierge to be the narrator, again, local trustworthy, you know, character to give that kind of authentic experience. So it’s not like we’re shooting corporate video as much as we created for them these stories, these micro-media that are searchable on the Web, that people can find and find useful information.

Andy Plesser: So what’s next for Turn Here? I understand you’re experimenting with some new publishing platforms. If I’m not mistaken, you just opened a You Tube channel.

Brad Inman: Yeah, we created – we realized You Tube was a search engine for video. I’ve always contended that Google bought You Tube not because of its video or even because it was user generated. It was a search engine for the next, you know, wave of content which is video and so we looked at You Tube as this powerful search engine. So as the early days of search generally, if you had a Web page, you’d want to get it indexed and get it up there quickly.  So we created a channel on You Tube. We created a real estate play list. We created a travel play list, a local merchant play list.
We have all our videos up there, you know, very searchable and accessible and there’s a lot of user-generated tools on You Tube that make it powerful where people can register for your play lists. They can store it. They can send email messages. They can comment. They can rate them and we just began to do this and we’re – you know, already – take the small merchant videos or the neighborhood videos. They’re getting a lot more streams than if we’d just, you know, done it from our own destination site.

[End of Audio]

YouTube, TurnHere, Brad Inman

Associated Press Explores Videoblogs with "Reel City Tales"

Ilana Arazie, Associated Press

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[Start of Audio]

Ilana Donna Arazie: At the AP, I work at the online v­ideo net – I work in the online video network department, but on the side you know that – I was more on the business side of online video, but on my own personal time I was creating my own videos, doing the storytelling online. So I distributed on different sites like Network2 and YouTube and put some videos together and I sent it over to the editors at asap. And I said take a look, this is what I’ve been doing, and they really – they liked the idea and they said, “Would you expose yourself out to our affiliates and tell your stories for us and do a video blog?”

Andy Plesser: So tell us about the blog here at the Associated Press, sort of what role it has within the company.

Ilana Donna Arazie: Well, it’s separate. It’s for the asap service.

Andy Plesser: What is that?

Ilana Donna Arazie: Asap is an AP service that started about a year or two ago. It’s a youth driven AP service. They wanted – were able to start something like this ’cause it’s younger and hipper and they could experiment a bit more.

Andy Plesser: So we’re experimenting right now. How do you see success – what do you think a success of a video blog is? How do you gauge that?

Ilana Donna Arazie: Success is – you know I’ve had some newspapers email me and put it up on their home page. I mean that’s a really big deal for newspapers to feature a blog, a video blog, so success is getting feedback from newspaper sites and TV sites saying, “This is great. We’d like to feature it.”

Andy Plesser: You’re observing the scene. What do you think some of the interesting trends that’re emerging in video blogging?

Ilana Donna Arazie: Well, I mean it’s just really exploding. I mean it’s amazing how many people are just getting involved and creating their own programming. People from grandmothers I’ve seen to regular housewives, so I’m just seeing a lot of every day people starting their own video blogs and doing their own storytelling, or having something to say or share.

 Andy Plesser: Well tell us about the segment about – you called deal breakers. We saw that recently. Tell us how that idea came to be and a little bit how you organized that and what went into producing that spot.

Ilana Donna Arazie: Well, I did a story on deal breakers in the city because I just felt meeting so many people here that we’re a very fast-paced society, and we’re also fast about our relationships and how quickly we go through them. So I really wanted to get into and find out what people thought about what their biggest deal breakers are. It just seems like we are so quick to just move on to the next person in our love lives and relationships. So I just went out on the street and talked to people about their deal breakers and it’d be – it’s really interesting to find out why someone would end a relationship and I got a bunch of people to open up about that.

[End of Audio]

Associated Press, Ilana Arazie, Real City Tales

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

Alex Laats, PodZinger

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[Start of Audio]

Alex Laats: What I’m gonna show you is how on PodZinger content, we are creating channels of media that enhance the search into the media for the user. I’m gonna show that not only with respect to podcast content, but also with respect to user-generated content. With respect to podcast content, what we’ve done is we’ve started to organize and create more and more channels of media so that within the collection of podcast content, there’s a whole section of content that’s related to baseball, and I can create more micro searches, which are related to individual players, like an Alex Rodriguez.

When I click on something like that, I bring up content that relates specifically to discussion of Alex Rodriguez. Since it’s RSS based, a user can save as an RSS link on their site, and we have more and more people that are saving their RSS searches on their site, or post on their blog or whatever it may be. Now, one of the things that we’ve done is to expand beyond the world of podcasts into the world of user-generated content starting with YouTube. And so for now, as I mentioned before, this is kind of almost like a capability demonstration where we’re showing how you can search for specific amounts of content throughout the world of YouTube, and even more powerfully, search for content in YouTube according to channels of media.

And so we have some very broad channels, like sports entertainment, and we have others that we’re exposing that’re more micro, like magic tricks or poker. And let’s stick for a moment with the sports category. Let’s explore something like snowboarding where I can search solely in the YouTube sports category around snowboarding content and bring up – what I’ve done there is I’ve narrowed the world that I’m searching into content that’s only associated with sports, and then within that searching content that is snowboarding content. And when we search for it, we search for it not only in the metadata associated with the content, but also into the content itself.

What this does is it provides for a better experience because I can navigate into the world of sports, and then I can specifically search for what I care about. We imbed the video player from YouTube. We show where in the content snowboarding is discussed, and you can see in this particular piece of content there’s quite a rich discussion at several points in the video. And we – and then we bring in other related content that is about snowboarding. So what we’ve done here is we’ve made it possible for a consumer to much more effectively find what they wanna find by two parts. One is navigating the world according to media channels, which is sports, and then searching more specifically on what they care about, which is snowboarding.

And then once they’re into this environment, now they’re in a world of consumption about content that’s relevant to them, and in this world is opportunities to bring in very targeted advertising targeting someone who’s interested in advertising to a snowboarding or perhaps action sports demographic.

[End of Audio]

video search, YouTube, PodZinger, Alex Laats

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

Alex Laats, PodZinger

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[Start of Audio]

Alex Laats: When it comes to a search for audio and video content, the key is that you actually have to have access into the words that are spoken inside of the video or audio content. In the absence of that, all you’re searching are titles and maybe a summary, information that the author of the content created, such as show notes. Or user generated tags.

Andy Plesser: Alex, tell us a little bit about PodZinger and what you guys do up there and how the technology works.

Alex Laats: We operate a farm of servers that run speech to text technology that come from PodZinger’s parent company, BDN. That farm of servers is – basically ingests audio and video. It runs it through by, in essence, watching it once, and takes every word spoken in an audio or video segment and tags it with the identification of that word. We call it a rough transcript, or what I really call it is a text index. So think of it as – much as sites – web ______ _______ sites are very much about tagging media in order to be able to create additional value and access to that media. This is about trying to tag every word with the identity of that word and the location of that word as it occurs in the video.

And so, of course, much like humans, more than humans, computers are imperfect. They’re just not perfect, so they’re not going to get a perfect transcript. So – however, they create so much more metadata about video and audio so that a user can actually find content that’s relevant to them that would otherwise be black space to Google or Yahoo.

Andy Plesser: I understood that you folks really index podcasts or files that’re sent to you by RSS. Now you’re doing user-generated content and you’re indexing and organizing YouTube files? Can you explain that a little bit?

Alex Laats: We literally take every file that’s produced on YouTube, and we’ve done this since the beginning of December so now we’re at somewhere around 1-1/2 million videos in just over three months. Okay, so it’s massive amounts of video that’s being created, and we run that through our farm of servers, and we take all the metadata that’s associated with the content on the YouTube page and then add a whole lot more starting with things like is it music or is it not music? Then we say okay, and how much of it is rich in word – kind of word density? For that content, we run it through our speech detection engine and create a rich text index of that piece of media.

So what that does then is it creates a much richer set of metadata and tags associated with each video. On top of that, we add topic classification. So what we do is – we think we help make that – turn what is kind of a hard to access, hard to consume, hard to advertise collection – massive collection of media, and we turn that into an easy to consume, easy to search, easy to advertise collection of media.

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video search, YouTube, PodZinger, Alex Laats