Video search startup EveryZing just landed its biggest fish yet: NBC Universal. Boston-based EveryZing signed a master service agreement with NBC to provide video search and search-optimization technologies across all of its online properties, which include NBC.com, iVillage, CNBC.com, and the websites for Bravo, Sci-Fi, and Telemundo. (The deal does not cover Hulu, which is a joint venture between NBC and Fox).
NBC is also investing in the company, leading its latest $8.25 million C round, through its venture capital arm, the Peacock Equity Fund. Peacock Equity put in $3 million of the total, with existing investors Fairhaven Capital, General Catalyst Partners, Accel Partners and BBN Technologies putting up the rest. The valuation was flat with the last $10 million round the company raised in 2007.
With the partnership, EveryZing will start powering search across NBC’s sites, starting with CNBC.com in a few weeks. As an enterprise search company, EveryZing offers a universal search box for finding not just video, audio, but also text results within a site or network of sites. After ingesting all of the video and audio content, it uses natural language processing and speech-to-text technologies to create a searchable transcript. As NBC digitizes its vast archive of TV shows, many of which are stored on old videotapes that are beginning to deteriorate, EveryZing can process the video to make it searchable. (The technology originated at BBN). It can also do directed indexing of YouTube videos by ingesting all the videos on certain channels, for instance.
As EveryZing creates transcripts for searching purposes, they also become available for contextual ad targeting in and around the videos themselves. NBC.com alone has streamed more than one billion full episodes of TV shows over the past 18 months, it recently announced. EveryZing will also be making available a chromeless, re-skinnable video player that includes the text of all the spoken words in the video, as well as the ability to play both related YouTube and Brightcove videos inside the same player.
wow! this is huge
natural language processing?
how does everyzing fit into that.
BroadcastLocator.com – emit yourself
I am confused, doesn’t NBC (sure it’s MSNBC) already have a partnership with Microsoft, so why not join-up with them to do this? I am sure they already have a system like this up and running somewhere in their R&D Departments.
Jon
http://WoodMarvels.com – Create Unique Memories
I think they just got lucky. Their technology has a number of drawbacks and they tend to oversell. So I just hope that nbc did their homework or they’ll have some problems delivering.
Also I think their pricing is too expensive… and they do have scalability issues. Their pricing is setup so that customers prepay/finance growth.. something that brings along it’s own problems…
Sounds like you work for one of their competitors.
I’m guessing that anyone in this business oversells. I mean come on, is it (or anyone) really that good at creating near transcript output of an arbitrary video??? I was just watching the 1st video linked here (http://www.crun...mpany/everyzing) and the guy claims that they can. I’m no speech recognition researcher but I know that are significant limitations in the field. There must be some major constraints in the technology but no one is actually asking these questions in the interviews.
sounds like a good investment
Everyzing is solid, smart, scalable – and this move makes Hulu an even more viable competitor to Youtube – particularly when it comes to search, where Youtube is still in diapers.
That said, I’m predicting right here, right now, that Google will steal their thunder in less than six months when they start rolling out speech-to-text on a larger scale (they’ve already tested the water around the election cycle last year).
If Google can afford the bandwidth to offer this as a free service through YouTube…game over for everyzing and everyone else in this space.
This is interesting, but is automatic speech recognition really needed if most pre-recorded television shows are already transcribed to provide closed captioning?