April 24, 2007

CastTV Raises $3.1 Million, Battles Google And AOL In Video Search

Michael Arrington

20 comments »

San Francisco-based CastTV, a video search service that is yet to launch, announced a $3.1 million round of financing from Draper Fisher Jurvetson this morning.

We first wrote about the company, which is led by husband and wife team Edwin Ong and Alex Vikati, last October. See our post and screenshots here.

AOL arguably has the best video search technology through their acquisition of Truveo in early 2006. Google also has a growing video search engine that includes both Google Video and YouTube videos.

Since many videos posted on the internet contain little or no associated meta data to describe what’s in the video, services like AOL’s Truveo and CastTV look at surrounding text to help determine what the video is about, and make it more searchable. Truveo does a great job with this. CastTV is much better based on the demos I’ve seen. Alex and Edwin won’t disclose all of the technology behind the service, but part of the trick is that they are able to track videos through multiple links on a site, collecting metadata along the way. And they also parse the code on the video files as well, gathering additional information about the content. If tags are available for the videos (such as YouTube tags), these are indexed as well. The final step is actually even more interesting - CastTV will take the data they are able to collect about a video and search the web in general for additional data. If there’s a close enough match, CastTV adds that information to the content metadata. And unlike other video search tools, CastTV indexes movies and shows from iTunes and other for-pay services.

The company says they will enter private beta next month; full launch will come this summer.

Sphere It

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 8:27 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.

DramedyTV

April 24th, 2007 at 12:12 pm

Nice domain name! .com domains are still king!
videofanboi

April 24th, 2007 at 12:14 pm

“Since many videos posted on the internet contain little or no associated meta data to describe what’s in the video, services like AOL’s Truveo and CastTV look at surrounding text to”

This will be interesting. I can only imagine what will happen when they try to make sense of viewer comments, the like of which can be found on YouTube.
jacobo

April 24th, 2007 at 1:48 pm

what about blinx? They do speech recognition (so no meta data at all) and also add metadata from other sites to video descriptions so sounds very similar. They also did a deal with quintura recently who is a very cool new visual search site you should check out too at http://www.quintura.com!

jacobow
maddy

April 24th, 2007 at 2:16 pm

i too love Blinkx - have just started using them. especially love the “Blinkx Remote”. great little tool to find entire TV shows online. check em out.
rod

April 24th, 2007 at 3:10 pm

To some degree I question the need for video search beyond keywords, tags, and social referral. Generally, you can find what you want at YouTube or Google Video without the need for an entire complex meta-video-search-engine. Additionally, verticals like SuTree will provide more relevant results within their silo than CastTV will be able to.

So- ultimately, does this idea/technology really service a need? Or is it going to be one of those firms with a technology flailing around for a business plan?

——-
http://techfold.com
tvlover

April 24th, 2007 at 5:06 pm

rod- of course there is a need for video search, and a smart one at that.

there’s a lot of video on the web beyond google and youtube - like all the content from major networks (grey’s, lost, everything!) - and sometimes it’s hard to find the video you want and weed out what you don’t.
dreadsword

April 24th, 2007 at 5:47 pm

tvlover - fair enough, there’s lots of stuff scattered everywhere. That being said, I’ll still ask you to really consider the usage scenarios implied by your examples. If you’re looking for Grey’s Anatomy, where are you going to look? iTunes if you want it legally, YouTube or P2P if not. By providing the most popular platform for distribution YouTube has already addressed a great deal of the problem CastTV seeks to solve.

Certainly, there’s a slice of content out there that isn’t well indexed on one of the big video sites, but I’d argue that that slice is very small and not in demand enough to build a profitable business around. Cool technology != business model.

The comparative example I’m really thinking of is Riya - remember them?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006.....egy-shift/

Riya = CastTV for images

Personally, I’d take the technology to collect meta-data around an object (be it a word, phrase, video, etc) across sites and adapt it to a full-on search engine positioned for acquisition by Yahoo or MSN, or build a hyped-up Powerset competitor.

——-
http://techfold.com
API Advocate

April 24th, 2007 at 6:01 pm

One way to get a leg-up and beat the incumbents is to quickly release and promote an open API to CastTV–any plans of doing that?
David Mackey

April 24th, 2007 at 6:45 pm

Not too big on video search. I’ll just StumbleUpon.
Jay (living in First Life)

April 24th, 2007 at 8:06 pm

@ tvlover - I think you are right, there is a need. That being said, I doubt any of these start-ups are going to solve the need. Everyone will still turn to Google or YouTube.

Another case of designing products for the TechCrunch readership and VCs blowing away money.
RaJ

April 24th, 2007 at 8:18 pm

Nice domain. Lots of sites with video search. Never know even google can improve the video search.

http://www.suggestusability.com
cdo

April 24th, 2007 at 9:24 pm

The founders are whipsmart. And user-focused - been at work on this for a while. There will be different approaches to video, like other types of search. While switching costs are low to zero, if cast tv gets it right more than half the time, it will be better than the current experience that is charitably described as video ’search.’
They have a gem, methinks.
xtraa

April 25th, 2007 at 2:00 am

They may suck. Look at their job descriptions, doesn’t sound like fun.
videosearchinchina

April 25th, 2007 at 2:22 am

Check out the video search engine in China: http://www.souxou.com. Michael, I wish you can read Chinese!
pallet jack

April 25th, 2007 at 7:13 am

- honestly -

- video search will always be second - to word search. So Google being #2 (Although they are #1)

- isnt the worst thing in the world
daddyclay

April 25th, 2007 at 7:42 am

As a web video producer, we’re having to do some inelegant things like publish transcripts of video segments below the player to make our content visible to current search (I’ve noticed other producers doing this as well). We can’t wait for an engine that can mine the video data so we can go to a cleaner interface. I hope CastTV and all the rest get this right. We need them.
john griffin

April 25th, 2007 at 8:35 am

congrats to casttv. i remember TC writing about them what seemed like ages ago and then not hearing anything. glad to have their services out there and good luck to alex and edwin.
heroesfan

April 25th, 2007 at 8:57 am

I found http://www.sidereel.com in a forum a few days ago and have been using it to find places to catch up on Heroes (www.sidereel.com/Heroes). It’s like a wiki, so I added some information about some of the older episodes. It’s not perfect, but it helped me out.
Andrew

April 25th, 2007 at 12:23 pm

This is a similar approach to what Google does with it’s image search. The information about an image is based on such factors as image name, text around the image and links to the the page with that image. How accurate this approach you can check for yourself by trying to search something on Google Image search. There are chances that you will find whatever you looking for, however there are more chances to find something relevant using stock photography or clip art.
When it comes to visual data, text search approach has disadvantages. Instead of just give the user text info about the video, the results should display larger thumbnails and not only one thumbnail.

So far I’ve been using http://yuxt.com . It’s easier to find something there, plus I like to store the results so I can access them later.
Corvallis Apartment Rentals

April 30th, 2007 at 4:29 am

CastTV doesn’t seem to resemble search name, but I guess neither does google!