Webware

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.