New media player searches for spoken words in videos

EveryZing, a media indexing company, is launching its own media player that lets people search for spoken words within videos.

The player's secret power is that it also indexes YouTube videos, giving a publisher who embeds YouTube content more functionality than YouTube itself provides.

The new video player, called MetaPlayer, uses technology the company already has in the market in its ezSearch and ezSEO products.

EveryZing is a business-to-business technology provider; MetaPlayer is provided to its customers alongside the other back-end tools. On sites that support it (the first announced is the Dallas Cowboys' site), people will be able to type in a query in the video player and see where on that video (and other videos on the site), the term entered comes up; they can then jump to that spot.

The MetaPlayer shows results of speech-to-text encoded and lets people jump to specific points in a video.

(Credit: EveryZing)

EveryZing technology also allows companies to ingest YouTube content and display it in the MetaPlayer. When played, the video still streams from YouTube; MetaPlayer keeps its own index of the text in the video and matches up the words and time codes to the YouTube video, allowing viewers to jump to locations within the embedded MetaPlayer.

People can share MetaPlayer videos made up of clips of other ones, but Viddler-style commenting, in which people can attach text comments to particular points in a video, is still under development.

Making videos more searchable is good for users, but the real business benefit to this technology is advertising; it allows marketing programs to be attached to particular points in a video, possibly automatically.

The player can also index YouTube videos.

(Credit: EveryZing)

See also: Blinkx, Brightcove, Digital Smiths, ThePlatform, Maven, VideoEgg, and Adap.tv.

[simpleweb]

Its good to know more and more companies including google are coming with real meaningful apps
and this is just the begining

[knowles2]

So who do you reckon gonna by these guys out, google, Microsoft or Yahoo, I doubt they will stay independent for long.

[CydeSwype]

Is it clear that a company that offers a product like this is allowed to use the YouTube player in this way?

http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/terms.html

Check out section III part 4 (Commercial Use). I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to advertise on, in or even around YouTube content unless there's other content on the page of enough value to warrant the ad. Said another way, YouTube content can't be the chief asset on a page that you're selling ads against.

[pomade7]

this technology has been around for awhile.....video indexing by closed captioning/speech recognition has been around for many years. Virage (acquired by Autonomy) was one of the first companies to commercialize this before the dot.com years - I believe CNET used to use their service. Challenge is not every video has closed captioning (which is the best way to get the text for the video scenes), speech recognition is not very reliable, and outsourcing it to human beings to transcribe it takes very long time.
But then again, youtube wasn't the first company to introduce video sharing site, they made it lot easier, free, and came in right timing :)

- J.