Everyzing Lands NBC as Strategic Investor
Everyzing, a video search company we’ve written about a few times, today announced a partnership with NBC Universal, and an $8.25 million C round led by NBC’s Peacock Equity.
The most notable part of the deal is that Everyzing will run the video search capability across NBC’s online sites, including its flagship NBC.com, CNBC, Bravo, Sci-Fi and Telemundo. As NBC ports more and more video to these sites, searchability becomes an important consideration. Everyzing will help it get there, with a powerful engine for processing and indexing video content, including the generation of searchable transcripts.
Video content obviously isn’t inherently searchable the way text is, making video search engines like Everyzing (and that provided by blinkx, ScanScout and Adap.tv) increasingly important. Once you generate text from transcripts, adjacent Web site info, and the other combination of methods that comprise these engines’ “secret sauce,” video can become more searchable.
But importantly, the parallel goal accomplished by Everyzing’s “MetaPlayer” video processing technology is generating contextual hooks that can be used for better ad targeting. As we’ve written in the past (quoting myself so I don’t have to repeat myself):
Beyond the user-centric nature of the MetaPlayer, its underlying technology could also be used for better video monetization. In other words, the same contextual hooks that its speech recognition uncovers to index video will also serve to assign meaning for better contextual ad matching. This not only deals with individual words, as is done with text ads, but also employs pattern matching technology to make sense of decidedly more complex video
This will be a powerful tool for NBC as its online video libraries grow (the partnership doesn’t include Hulu at the outset, however). The value will be shown in better ad targeting as well as additional traffic via VSEO.
