The Pluggd team is used to switching gears. The startup began in February 2006 as a destination site for podcasts. But after witnessing iTunes “suck the air out” of the market, it began developing speech recognition technology for video that could identify particular topics within news clips and other diverse content.
The venture, which was started by two former Amazon Web Services employees, has taken another step in the video direction by launching a full-blown Brightcove competitor called Delve Networks. Development began in earnest about ten months ago when Pluggd raised its Series A; the site went live just yesterday.
Like Brightcove - and several other platforms such as Maven Networks, Move Networks, and Ooyala - Delve Networks wants to manage and deliver video content for medium and large web publishers. Its management panel places uploaded videos into channels that are delivered through a customizable Flex-based player. Videos can be tagged, sorted into genres, and viewed through filters. The entire management experience is meant to be a large step up from that of Brightcove (and having suffered through Brightcove’s confusing user interface myself, Delve’s UI certainly appears much more intuitive).
Delve Networks is still putting the pieces together on some of the functionality publishers have come to expect, like analytics for tracking how videos are consumed. But the company has already rolled out is its primary differentiator: the same in-video topic highlighting technology it developed earlier while called Pluggd.
Publishers have the option of attaching a heat map of sorts to their videos. The map shows up below videos as a variously colored bar, which ranges from blue to red and activates when the user types in a particular topic. For example, if you’re watching a clip about a golf tournament, you can enter “Tiger Woods” and the bar will show you where the commentator spends time discussing and showing footage of that famous golf player. The topics are automatically detected by a combination of speech and contextual analysis, so publishers don’t have to break down their videos manually.
CEO Alex Castro tells me this technology engages viewers more effectively, and therefore monetizes them better as well. While the company is still working on the player’s user interface (and moderation panel for that matter) it has already signed up several beta customers including CNET, Intel, Small Screen Network, Jaudible, Bikini.com, and Wallstrip. Pricing has yet to be nailed down completely, but a free version for trial purposes will be made available in the next few weeks.
Good for them to be flexible enough to switch gears when they discovered that their original market was an iTunes vacuum. We’re planning to produce a Smibs ‘Grow Smart’ web tv show later this year so it’s good to have another option to broadcast.
The “search inside” technology is something that should work very well for news, sports and information. No other video platform that I know of offers this feature inside a platform.
Funny to see all these video self professed “Platform-Networks” competing for the same thing. how can these be networks or platforms with a one channel unknown domain name. in the end these sites will disappear or merge with someone else. in 5 years there will be thousands of wanna be platform video networks and 99% of the population will only use the top 3.
http://NetworkLocator.com
Mark, you are missing two important players:
1. one important newcomer is Kaltura, which is the open-source competitor of this space. originally Kaltura launched as a collaborative video destination site, and the relaunched as the open-source video platform for video management, creation, and collaboration
2. another is “the platform” which offers broadband video management and publishing tools
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Wow, looks like the same Vaporware that Pluggd had. Demos on the site, but nothing of substance to actually use. Maybe we’ll see another name change and change of focus before these guys run out of money!
exaclly this site is very good!
I have to Alex and co. at Plug…I mean Delve. They’ve managed to go two full years without producing a workable product. Do they really expect to catch up to Brightcove? It’s not gonna happen.
I hear you Rob. I feel sorry for their investors. Castro and company don’t have a clue on how to release products. They operate at a snail’s pace.
This does seem like a step in the right direction for video platforms, but is it not the question of who is using not what it can do and its features? When talking about ‘platforms’ this can be taken as many things. Businesses and especially corporations will benefit from using video platforms and integrating web 2.0 features in the future and some are ahead of the time and choosing to do so now. I look at internet TV and video platforms from this angel as this is surely where there is money to be made.
http://www.brandstation.tv/
Welcome to the market-we have been offering this for close to a year now and our customers include FoxSports, Boston.com, and Cox Radio.
-Tom Wilde
CEO, EveryZing.com