Can EveryZing Automate Video SEO?

EveryZing (formerly named Podzinger) is a Boston based company that has announced a suite of products for video search, EveryZing’s ezSearch product lets media companies offer their users a single integrated search box for audio, video, images, and text. Once ezSearch has blended results into a unified database, the company’s ezSEO service can then make all that content easier to find.

The promise that ezSEO could virtually automate video search optimization led me to interview EveryZing CEO Tom Wilde.
He told me that EveryZing uses voice recognition technology developed by BBN (the pioneering engineering company that was so involved with the birth of the Internet that they get credit for using the @ sign in email addresses) for the federal government to use in homeland security.

EveryZing already has clients using their hosted services, including Boston.com, Reuters, Dow Jones, and powerhouse Boston radio station WEEI. Since EveryZing can time stamp every word they extract from a video, a user who missed a WEEI interview with Patriot’s quarterback Tom Brady could skip directly to the parts of the interview they are most interested in.

Tom says “We make multimedia discoverable across the Web and them enhancing user engagement with the content with better search. If consumers can find what they want quickly they’ll consume more.”

EveryZing describes ezSEO as the first comprehensive SEO solution for connecting audio and video content to the major search engines. The solution is oriented towards sites with large amounts of archived or legacy content that is not currently indexed. ezSEO works behind the scenes of a website to unearth content in a way that search engines can find it. It automatically extracts keywords, topics, and other information and then uses BBN proprietary natural language processing to identify key terms, concepts, places, and people so as to create automatic tags for the content. The technology continuously “learns” what a site’s multimedia is about so when new content is added, the system automatically knows about it, analyzes it, and publishes new, highly “searchable” pages instantaneously.

The company notes that, ironically, the key to successful audio and video search is text. ezSEO uses the BBN technology (the result of over $100 million in government funding) to ensure that every piece of audio and video on a client’s site is wrapped in a rich layer of metadata, including a full text output of the video’s spoken word track. The system also applies a “confidence score” next to each word.

The result is that the audio or video content can be searched as easily as text. The service starts at $5K per month, which includes optimization of several hundred hours of content. They will be rolling out an agency program in the second quarter.

EveryZing has an exclusive commercial license to the BBN speech to text technology. But, don’t worry. BBN continues to sell the technology to the government for use in homeland security work.

Bob Heyman is the Chief Search Officer at Mediasmith in San Francisco, and coined the terms “Audience Development” for building traffic to websites and “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO). The Video Search column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.