Factiva/Everyzing Partnership Points a Way to Multimedia Today
Important Details: This week Factiva will launch its multimedia service, allowing its customers to access video and audio segments beside text stories when keyword searches are done through the research service. The new service is powered by Everyzing (formerly Podzinger), which does the heavy lifting of voice-to-text conversion, thus getting the audio and video content ready for Factiva’s own search engines to index, just as it has long searched text to provide pertinent search results.
The launch is the culmination of lots of behind-the-scenes work and focus-grouping, answering, says Factiva Director of Product Management Lou Paglia, this seemingly simple question: “How do we bring together the two worlds of print and audio/video?” Paglia says that Everyzing does the translation work, and its translation algorithms are 70-80% “precision accurate.” Factiva can then read the text and categorize it by relevant keywords and entities such as people, places and companies.
Factiva users will see a new co-branded (with Everyzing) player. While there will a graphical ad presence within the player, Paglia says that at launch there will be no pre- or post-roll advertising presented.
Overall, Paglia describes this launch as a step in a wider process of “moving content cohesively into [customers’] environments.” That means that as the user experience is refined, the customer will have access to traditional products such as newspapers, magazines and wire services – and blogs, vlogs (video blogs), and professionally produced video and audio from the world’s top business news and information producers.
“There may be an hour-long video of Steve Jobs talking about the iPhone,” says Paglia. “We want our customers to know it’s there.”
Or as Everyzing CEO Tom Wilde, a veteran of FAST Search, Lycos and MIVA, puts it more broadly for even non-business consumers, “I want to know everything there is to know about Lindsey Lohan.” Wilde says his company can provide a variety of publisher solutions, including speech-to-text technology, natural language processing, feed relationships with content providers and the player technology itself. The company recently raised $10 million and was spun off from parent BBN.
Implications: Seamless multimedia searching is a holy grail, one that’s issued a siren call for about a decade. Outsell believes that Factiva’s launch is another step in the right direction, though we don’t expect seamlessness at this point. The model is the right one. Make it simple to use — don’t make the customer re-learn a new interface, says Paglia — leveraging that simple horizontal search box that’s become an emblem of our age. We all expect to type in a word or two, and have the relevant world returned to us. That world has always included pictures and voices, in addition to words, but in the old media world, they were subdivided into newspapers, magazines and broadcast. In new media, they are all the same thing — solutions to what we want to know.
Knowing what’s in the video and audio content is essential — simply knowing the program’s title doesn’t cut it. Everyzing is one key player in this race, while there are numerous other companies doing voice-to-text, as it does, as well as others relying on closed-captioning and traditional print transcripts. Each method has its own strengths, weaknesses and costs. The key for aggregators, publishers and any company presenting news content into 2008 is to step into this multimedia present. Outsell believes that near-seamless multimedia presentation will soon be the price of admission — not a rarity. For consumer-oriented publishers, the rewards are already tangible, with $25-90 CPM ad rates reported for pre-rolls associated with higher quality news video. For aggregators such as Factiva that rely on subscription revenue, the toe-dipping into advertising will be more cautious, but quite promising. In addition, Google AdSense-like contextual ads (picking up the video content keywords) is also on the horizon, adding still another audio/video-related ad source.
For all presenting news content, multimedia is now a race toward readiness, building or partnering to build out the necessary infrastructure to give the customers what they clearly want.