Video Search First session of the first day! Woohoo. “New” Sponsor banners (to me) apart from the regulars (Jupiter, SEW, ClickZ): incisivemedia andSEMList.com. Moderated by Chris Sherman Intro remarks: Welcome…we in for 4 days of new and interesting content. Video Search (VS) has been around for a long time, but starting to grow more effective. VS is hot and getting hotter.
Suranga Chandratillake, blinkx Blinkx.tv is a VS Engine. A destination and syndicated service. A video delivery platform. A monetization platform. Suranga will focus on how to get content into blinkx. The system uses spiders for general Internet and RSS. Online submission for individual files and feeds. They use: META, speech recognition, Visual analysis, text on page, date, and more. Also moving into a “new game” of having Content Partners. This content program is open to everyone and they are working with full range of distributors from Broadcast stations down to individual film makers, etc. “DirectPlay” product coming out which will help gain more content. Will have free hosting, does a “direct play” of your content immediately on search. Monetized by paid placements. Finishes with an impressive list of partners to date.
John Thrall Head of Mulitmedia Search Engineering Yahoo Is very passionate about video search, and knows this is the “early days” of VS. Yahoo! VS Launched 12 months ago, it is now in 15 countries. 1000’s of channels, millions hours of content. Gets content by crawling, RSS, and content providers. Works as a KW search index which allows for some advanced search. Goal is to be comprehensive. Shows old picture of “boxing monkey” which was the type of content found just 2 years ago. Now there are products including Atom Films, CNN, PRNewswire, VH1, Reuters, CBS, ABC News, CMT. Recent trend is finding particular scenes from movies and trailer: “The Pirkinning” (sp?) the number one Finnish film of all time. Has over 5 million downloads already.
Just getting started: Multiple disconnect standards. Many forms of discovery: Discovery: get it indexed in Yahoo search and it will be found. Use crawler friendly links. Ranking: quality and topic is most important page must be relevant to the video in order to rank well. Media RSS: and extension to the media RSS META Standard, does allow RSS with enclosures to be supported by creating Media RSS. Feedburner and Flicker generate Media RSS automatically. Using this is “ a good way to get listed quickly”
Karen Howe AOL Audio Video search. Gives a quick overview of Singingfish: 60 mil streams indexed, including Real, Windows media, Quicktime and MP3. Since medium is dynamic, they have to constantly go back to ensure content is still there. Nott all 600 mil, streams are searchable because of this. Flash not yet searchable. Like Suranga, they also crawl the web. The do focused directed crawls into content areas where they know they will find “deep pools of content.” “Have META Data, will travel” AOL syndicates Singingfish AV Search to 20 different AOL and non-AOL properties, this has resulted in remarkable increase in queries. Also mentions these are the “early days.” Fields most important for accurate recall: META Title. Author, perfomer, creatot of content. Uses Description field that comes from META Desc. Use copyright Information also. Second level of META data also used: Publisher, album desc, notes, etc… about 70 different areas. Recommends adding as many fields as possible for most likely chance of ranking. She is making an “evangelistic plea” for the META Data side. AOL’s goal: to get your content indexed. Sfmedia RSS 2.0 Module Specifications: rying to get a conformed standard method to submit large numbers of streams (if you have just a few streams to submit, can be done directly through Singinfish). This RSS Specification is designed for sites with hundreds of streams. Works for audio, video, podcasts, videoblogs, Flash. Full engineering support.
Jon Leicht SiteLab 2 Questions he always gets: 1 are people searching for video? (obviously) 2 how do I do this? (to follow) How to “do it right.” They use a “Meta Toolkit” that they have created for developers. Meta selection can include campaign kw’s, but should be very descriptive of the content of the video. File naming is critical. Page content appears to have an effect on media search. He echoes other speakers in saying that the page’s content should contextually match up with the video in order to get better rankings. Recommends production of transcript of audio for use in Google. META should be added during encoding. Most encoding engines allow for META fields, but most important are Title, Desc, and KW’s (sounds familiar). Cautions against kw stuffing because searchers are getting tired of seeing those types of desc. META must be embedded into video when encoding. Can be done in-house and he recommends “Discrete Cleaner for the PC” or Media Cleaner” for Mac. Allows for encoding of all formats. Shows a couple screenshots of “Media Cleaner” looks easy to learn, lots of options available.
Like submitting a site to a SE, Video needs to be submitted. Recommends using Singingfish. They suggest putting all media elements in a single directory on your site in order to be quickly found when the crawler returns. Also great that everyone seems to have RSS feeds. Google has a proprietary desktop app that you need to download, good if you have lots of content. G also asks for “their mold” of the already encoded information (Meta). You can also update Meta information any time you need to update the campaign. Good and bad: have to have Google Player to view video. Blinkx has a very cool way of indexing info. Allows for podcasts, streams etc. Allows in a Wizzard-based form the simple submission with a short description. If you are low on bandwidth, you can also upload the content to them to “get rid of it” (like Google). Yahoo and Alta Vista still has a standard site crawl, which does pose a problem if you are embedding the video ina pop-up window, etc. Optimize the links, don’t use “high Bandwidth/Low Bandwidth” anchor text, instead be more specific.” Include a link to an optimized “Video map” Page on your site, especially when embedding video. You can place shorter versions of the content on this “Video Map.” Future of VS: Content drives demand. More and more players getting involved. Specialty media SE’s emerging. For example, AOL is starting to encapsulate content by type. Competition=Spam. TV/Mobile/iPod deliver and search of media will help this to “take off” popularity-wise. Monetization of video.
Q&A Wondering how many queries per day in normal web search versus VS. Suranga: 80 video, 20 audio. Karen: hundreds of millions of searches a day on the web search side, very small percentage of that # for VS. One of the reasons is many people do not even know that the Video Tab exists. John: can’t give an exact number, but he says you can get the public information from Comscore, but he thinks 20-30 percent of searches are for images, and the search for video will keep growing. John: sees a blend between VS and traditional media opening content up to more people and thereby increasing the numbers as well. Describes the types of mergers such as AOL/Time Warner being a good thing.
Chris Sherman adds that no one has really touched on the whole idea of conversions…will this eventually be more of a “buy a video” system? Suranga: it is difficult to judge if users want a more TV-like experience or a more Internet-like experience when doing VS.
Dana Todd asks if they are aware of the new content standards being developed, and are there any legal limitations to anyone just starting a video channel? Karen say it is already being done, but the quality of production runs the spectrum. Mentions a TV channel in texas that is essentially an Internet TV station with pretty well –produced content. There are legal limitations such as not allowed to use someone else’s unlicensed media, such as “PodSafe(sp).” Suranga says that the problem is not only a legal one, but also technology problem. John adds that the illegal content issue is a hot topic, but many more people are creating their own content. He states you don’t “have to have that much talent to create something that will be of interest to someone” An example would be to create a video of his neighborhood, etc… Jon reminds that having information embedded into the video, you are protecting yourself at least rudimental…currently not available in jpeg but “they” are working on it.
Nacho ask if there is such a thing as video analytics…Karen says there is a tool to find out if someone who downloads a movie/segment watches the whole thing, but is VERY expensive. Currently too many reasons for things to go wrong…but people will put up with a shocking array for technical difficulties to finally get access to the content. Jon has seen people using proprietary systems that use Active X controllers to talk to the file and collect data. Karen adds that with Omniture they can tell how long people are on line during sessions, has seen an increase in Average Time Spent.
