While online video is a great tool, automatically indexing these videos and making them searchable is still a very hard task. EveryZing, a Massachusetts-based company that focuses on media indexing through speech-to-text and natural language processing, released a new version of its media player today that allows users to search online videos on third-party sites for keywords and tags. Currently, however, this technology is only available to EveryZing's corporate partners, with the Dallas Cowboys being the first to make use of these new capabilities. ]]>
While testing the new player, we came away thoroughly impressed with the accuracy of the transcripts and the ease of use of the interface.
MetaPlayer
As EveryZing's CEO Tom Wilde explained to us, EveryZing integrates the 'chromeless' players (which strip away the user interface and only deliver the video itself) that YouTube and many of its rivals make available, but which are not being used very often by third-party developers yet.
EveryZing's clients choose which videos they want to appear in the MetaPlayer on their sites.
The player itself is very nifty. Not only does EveryZing automatically tag every post, but it also makes every video searchable. There is also a strong SEO aspect to this new player, as EveryZing provides its partners with a full text transcript of the videos, which search engines can then index.
Sharing
EveryZing's MetaPlayer features most of the standard sharing options you would expect from a modern video player, including an easy way to embed clips from longer videos.
Comments are the only area where the MetaPlayer falls a bit behind its competition, as other companies like Viddler already allow their users to leave comments which then appear in the video itself, while the MetaPlayer does not feature any commenting functions yet.
Consumers?
We asked Tom Wilde if EveryZing was planning to release a consumer version of this product, but for now, EveryZing is focused on a licensing the MetaPlayer to its corporate partners. However, Wilde did not rule out the possibility that EveryZing could release a consumer oriented product in the future.
We know that Google, which has a vested interested in making videos searchable, is also working on a speech-to-text product for YouTube. The company has already made some videos related to the U.S. election searchable http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_audio_indexing_keyword.php , and chances are the Google will roll this feature out to a wider range of its users in the future.
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