Making video discoverable via search

EveryZing launches MediaCloud - a Web-based service to tag, transcribe and title video

EveryZing is set to announce Monday a new Web service to help media companies transcribe, tag, title and categorize their video to create hundreds of metadata around the content, thereby making it discoverable on the Web. EveryZing's new product is called MediaCloud, which is already being used by Reuters and Factiva.

With MediaCloud, media companies can post live or archived feeds of video, audio, images and text content to the cloud-based service and get in return a comprehensive set of metadata around the content. 

As someone in the business of publishing video, it's clear that a service like MediaCloud can save time by automating the process of tagging, titling, categorizing and transcribing. MediaCloud is available to publishers for 50 cents per minute of content processed, or lower at higher volumes.

The cost to transcribe and automate the tagging, titling and categorizing - which is what typically editors do - may not seem worth the expense. But most video publishers know that it's often the case that manual titling, tagging and categorizing can be inaccurate and/or mainly incomplete. 

The upside of a service like EveryZing's is that video typically hidden from search engines, has a higher probability of being found through search because of the density of the metadata supporting the video.

"As video online has gone mainstream, one of the challenges [for publishers] is how do you plug this content into the search economy?" said EveryZing CEO Tom Wilde, in an interview with me prior to the launch. "For the most part, people use Web search for video but Google understands text."

Essentially, by automating the process of adding metadata to video content, publishers are unleashing valuable content that can be indexed, found, and ultimately monetized. 

For example, one customer using EveryZing technology is Bob Villa, the home improvement guru. If someone searches for "unfreezing pipes," a Bob Villa video is found as the No. 3 search result on Google, even though there's little text around the video. EveryZing's technology reads inside the video, transcribes the video, and also optimizes the video for search results, by creating the HTML, and a SEO-friendly URL.

Clearly, the benefit to video producers is higher traffic from search engines to their sites. 

Other ways to use EveryZing technology is to make video more discoverable on a specific site. Fox Sports uses EveryZing to transcribe and categorize its video, resulting in videos appearing in search results. In one example, Wilde queried "Michael Phelps." In the search results, a Phelps video appeared, not because it was titled "Michael Phelps" but because the name appeared in the transcription and automated tags.

While tagging and transcribing can all be done with editors, clearly, the explosion of video content has made it difficult for publishers to keep up with the demand. The downside is that the valuable content they create has less of a chance to be found amidst the clutter of text content online.

As Wilde puts it: "By creating a transcript, we create a document for search recall, bringing back all the possible relevant content for that query."

If you're spending money to create valuable video content, it's wise to do what you can to make it found.