This evening we are very fortunate to have three highly respected participants in our Debate on Multimedia search. They are:





PodNova: “your place to find podcasts, videoblogs and your favorite blogs.”


Blinkx: “the world’s largest and most advanced video search engine.”

EveryZing: “the most powerful digital media merchandising platform available today.”


1) Until Google announced Google Universal, search was very vertically oriented. Do you think this trend to integrate multimedia search into one search bar will continue?

Yes. Google’s Universal Search release was less about innovation and more an acknowledgment that users don’t really use vertical search or “tabs.” Having run Terra Lycos’ worldwide search properties, I can tell you that single-digit percentages of users use the vertical tabs. The question of vertical search is really something created out of the industry rather than out of consumer demand. When you think about it from a user’s perspective, vertical search doesn’t make a lot of sense. Videos are on the Web, so why can’t I search them from the “Web Search” box? Users are interested in all content on a given topic, regardless of form factor. They expect the search box to do the magic of finding the right content and organizing it into an intuitive presentation. This puts a large burden on the content producer, regardless of form factor, to optimize all of their content for the search engines.

No, we don’t think that multimedia search will be integrated in one search bar. We approach ’searching’ as an integrated part of the whole consumption process of our users. First you want to find things, then you want to subscribe to or share it. The you download it to play it on a mobile device, or you play it online with onsite players.

- yes and no. While it’s useful to integrate text and multimedia results
when you do a search and are not sure of exactly what you want back, in most cases, users are increasingly focusing their efforts - they know from the outset that they are looking for video, or images, or text - or even encyclopedic-type information. If they are looking for a video of something, why bother with the images, text, etc.

2) How can publishers of multimedia content use search to make their companies more successful and what can they do to differentiate themselves?

The critical step is to be sure that the multimedia content can be found by the big text Web crawlers. This means that if your video doesn’t have a lot of text associated with it, it will be at a disadvantage. The vast majority of search traffic originates from the “Web search” box on the big four search engines (who control more than 90% of all searches). In addition, the ability to scalably create meta information for multimedia content is absolutely critical.

Content is still king. If you have the content that users want, you will end up higher in search results.

This is of paramount importance for them - if users can’t find their
content they won’t watch it. Having a handful of easy-to-find without search clips won’t work because that doesn’t address the long tail requirements of the Internet marketplace. blinkx published a whitepaper on video SEO - with recommendations on how to optimize your multimedia content for search - you can find it here.

3) With the increase in online video search and advertising start-ups, there has been a lot of emphasis on enhancing the user experience. What are you offering to users and your customers to do that?

EveryZing’s biggest innovation is the ability for users to search within videos and jump to the section of a clip based on their search terms. These “snippets” we create can be accessed from both the search results pages, as well as the player landing pages we deliver. Users have grown accustomed to this level of control in their Web search experience, and they desire it on a video search experience as well.

We’re focusing on a full integrated experience for our users. We want to be the place for users to find, subscribe to, share, play and download their podcasts and vodcasts. As we also create a desktop application (available for free for windows, mac and linux) we also provide ways for our users to sync their content with their offline devices like mp3 players etc.

blinkx offers the largest index of video content on the Web today; from an extremely diverse base of content providers - ranging from traditional outlets like Reuters and CBS, to user-generated content like YouTube and Revver, to niche channels like CyclingTV and Ministry of Sound. We’ve made an enormous variety and amount of video content available through a single destination. Also, we’ve built tools like blinkx Remote - which help users navigate directly to the increasing amount of long-form content on the Web - like popular TV shows such as Lost.

4) Online advertising is expected to skyrocket within the next year. What challenges lie ahead for targeted multimedia advertising?

Without being able to understand the content of a video, video ad targeting will remain as a blunt instrument. Tapping the full contents of a video brings multimedia into the world of contextual advertising, which is a business with $15BB in revenue this year. In addition, advertisers need to create more short form Web-purposed video creative to effectively target online video consumers without alienating them with lengthy pre-rolls or repurposed broadcast advertising content.

Correct profiling so targeting will be spot on. If you get this really good, then “advertising” will become “interesting information” for your users.

I think we’ve yet to arrive at a format that truly works - both for
advertisers AND for the user as well. Ideally, online video advertising
should combine the emotive power of TV promotion, with the utility of
contextual search advertising - the experience should be relevant and unobtrusive for users.

The floor is now open for your questions and comments!

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