The past month has seen lots of discussion of online video search. Companies are finding new ways to provide more relevant video search results beyond metadata - and using this to contextually target ads. Below is a rundown of the major players in video search, their technology and competitive advantage.

• Blinkx - The company has indexed more than 12 million hours of video and is in the news today for launching their contextual ad serving platform called AdHoc. Similar to EveryZing, the company uses speech recognition and like Truveo, and they power video search for a number of content-rich sites. But Blinkx claims to have a more advanced video analytics technology which “literally watches and listens” to the content to determine video content.
• CastTV - Still in beta, uses web-crawlers to find episode summaries from other web sources.
• Digitalsmiths - Their InScene digital indexing solution was used primarily by studios to catalog their massive content libraries. Today they unveiled VideoSense which contextually targets ads based on their technology of extracting metadata from broadband video.
• EveryZing - Formerly podzinger, the company uses speech recognition to more accurately catalog the content of audio and video, and tags the video based on the text so that users can click on a particular word surrounding their search phrase and begin the video there.
• Google - Always have to include GOOG in every online media discussion - they have smart people and smart technology but video search is one place in which they have fallen behind. A Google video search is strongly biased for Google videos - and the other companies on this list offer more comprehensive search options for video outside the Googisphere. They have been working on Video ID primarily for finding copyright violations. This will likely be used for improved search but it’s likely that they expand by buyout to expand their capabilities.
• Pixsy - A lot of what these guys do is private website image and video search, but the company has grown to become a large content aggregator and is increasingly becoming a distributor of aggregated content through the use of branded widgets and RSS to deliver relevant rich media content across the web.
• Truveo - The company owned by AOL received lots of attention last week after news that they were nearing 40 million unique viewers a month. Truveo powers video search for some of the major content producers online (including my company CSTV). Their Visual Crawler technology goes beyond the traditional metadata to determine visual characteristics of a site outside what a traditional web crawler could find. This provides search results most can’t match and more contextually accurate results.

There are other companies involved, clearly a company like Yahoo! comes to mind; but these are the technology players combining search with innovative ad-serving and distribution techniques. As we move toward greater use of video-rich internet applications and away from text-based interfaces the holy grail of serving only the ads people really want to see is getting closer to reality.

UPDATE: Great minds think alike, Paul Kedrosky today ran down a similar list focused exclusively on companies that offer contextual ad-serving (as opposed to public-facing search technology) as their primary offering. And thanks to Mary over at Dabble, I’m sure they’re not the only deserving company left off the list so please continue adding below.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Video Portals, advertising, video syndication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.