NBC Invests In Video Search Startup EveryZing And Signs Up As Its Biggest Customer

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.