In-Depth With EveryZing Chief Revenue Officer Stephen Baker

EveryZing, the search solutions provider well-known for offering speech-recognizable, time-coded, linkable transcripts for video and audio content in their multimedia search engine, today announced the official launch of its commercial program to larger media publishers.

Recently I conducted an exclusive interview with Stephen Baker, Chief Revenue Officer for EveryZing. Months ago I had the opportunity to preview a beta of their program on the Boston.com website, and Baker informed me since they’ve signed new major clients such as Reuters, Dow Jones, Intercom Radio, MarketWatch, and Tivo—all of them to launch later this year with their own EveryZing video program.

What is EveryZing?

The short history—EveryZing origins came out of a company called BBN Technologies, a government R&D shop that’s been around since 1948. One of their earliest IP families they started developing was creating a next generation speech text platform, which was being solely used for government purposes before becoming a commercial product—first through their earlier company incantation of Podzinger, and now its updated name, EveryZing.

While a well-known video search engine, blinkx, has touted its own speech recognition model for its indexed video content, EveryZing takes this technology several steps further. EveryZing’s own proprietary speech-to-text technology automatically classifies spoken-word multimedia content into meaningful topics and keywords, which visually appear to the user as actual, clickable, and navigation-friendly text.

“It all starts at Speech Text transcriptions since the internet is very much a text based environment, whether it’s searching for content, advertising, targeting, you really need to have a text version when you are using any sort of input for that,” says Baker. “So what we have focused on is building what we call a media merchandising platform, which is actually a search publisher’s solution that can make all audio and video content searchable, indexable by the major search engines via the text transcripts. We can also use that to improve the recall and precision kind of matrix on site search applications. We can also use the text to target advertising, kind of for agnostic to add that work around platforms.”

A B2B video search solution

A visit to the EveryZing site and searching its media results will bring a user experience far more robust than the consumer-grade YouTube platforms. Here you will find time-coded and fully linkable transcripts, graphic indicators of key points in a video (which are also accentuated with a keyword search), and a video player with social bookmarking and sharing capabilities that has also been well-tested by usability best practices. Simple enough for video newbies to use, and just the right amount of features for advanced video explorers.

“EveryZing is all around search and multimedia, and us publishing user and client content,” says Baker. “Our business plan is two-fold: One, driving better user experience, making it easier to navigate and integrate video into the site content itself. And second, doing it in a manner that makes it SEO-friendly.”

EveryZing’s infrastructure and program features

Baker explains that EveryZing maintains its entire program on several hundred servers. This content doesn’t typically host the multimedia content itself, but it is “where content is processed to create the text transcripts, where we do all the metadata extraction from those text transcripts.”

The program has two components—a service-based model and a hosted-based model. Participating in the EveryZing program starts off with up to 500 hours of content processing and a million page views.

On a hosted basis, EveryZing will take a customer’s web design templates—including search results and media landing pages—and build their content delivery system around them. Baker explained the work scenario with their beta customer, Boston.com. “Boston.com gave us their ad tags, they gave us their analytics tags, they seeded a URL name to us; plus they were involved in the entire design of the graphic templates themselves. Even their usability and UI (user interface) teams get involved in the process.

“That way, they get a overall low-cost, quick-time to market approach, that still gives them all the benefits of A) the traffic coming from their website, and B) them having all the analytics tags so they can see engagement and traffic growth. Lastly, all their ad tags are dropped in, their video player is dropped in. We basically become an extension of their web development team,” says Baker.

Baker is also proud of the openness of the program to their customers. “Everything is made available through EveryZing’s web services’ API to our customers,” says Baker. “Our customers can directly access that API every time they need the metadata, and incorporate it and formate it into their own web templates. We find more often, however, that our customers want us to design and host the templates, which makes sense since we’ve already spent a tremendous amount of work designing them to be very crawler-friendly and SEO-friendly.”

Let’s talk pricing

While EveryZing is not yet ready publicly disclose its pricing model, many companies with an abundance of quality, targeted multimedia content who are serious about engaging in a video SEO strategy (and heavy with targeted video content) may find it very reasonable cost-wise, and an especially high performance value compared to comparative SEO marking strategies for similar or larger budgets.

Baker explains that there are two components to Everzing’s pricing model: First is a monthly term license/fee, which includes a certain # of page views, a certain # of hours of content processing. “It’s similar to a CPM-based model with a fixed cost element to it, and that fixed cost is meant to cover our content processing cost of keeping our infrastructure up and running.” Baker also mentions that along with being a startup company comes some sales flexibility. “We has a few customers they do a revenue-sharing program with. Being a startup company, we’re flexible and open to that.”

While this will likely be outside the range of most independent media publishers, it’s certainly an option targeted to media conglomerates, including publishers with aggregated media content targeting a small region. A good client example Baker gives is a small media conglomerate with multiple local newspaper properties. “Because they’re pooling together all the video traffic across all of their newspapers, the economics work out extremely well for them.”

“Whether it’s national to hyper-local to global focus, the companies that we’re catering to right now consist largely of media conglomerates and larger media companies… on a direct sales model.”

Baker explains his company’s goal is to be recognized as the most search-friendly, user-oriented B2B multimedia search solutions provider for media publishers on the market. If their new product launches proves successful, that’s something which many also have many search marketers flocking to.

Grant Crowell is the CEO of Grantastic Designs, a web design and search solutions provider specializing in new media strategies for B2B and B2C companies.

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