Review of PodZinger, an Audio and Video Search Engine

del.icio.us |Digg it |Netscape |reddit |StumbleUpon |Yahoo MyWeb |Print This Post
Add this to your favourites

PodZinger, a BBN Technologies subsidiary, claims to be the world’s most powerful audio and video search engine and online advertising network. They claim to make it easy for their users to search for relevant content inside of audio and video by using their advanced speech recognition technology and natural language processing. This claim will definitely be put to test down the line as search giant Google enters the video search engine fray through its Google Video which Google wants to turn into a full time into a video search engine with YouTube taking care of the user generated content. With the rapid expansion of video content available and more and more bloggers taking to video blogging, the need for a video and audio search service like PodZinger becomes more necessary.

How does PodZinger work?

Podzinger creates an index of audio and video files in their database and using their “advanced” speech recognition technology and natural language processing, create an index of their content. Google, in this picture and text based ads, classifies its content using Metadata, such as the headline and introduction describing the audio file’s general content. PodZinger, using their speech recognition technology, searches words within both audio and video, not just using the metadata to classify content based on topic and usage.

As the name of the company suggests, PodZinger was created originally to target the Podcasts segment.Podcasts are difficult to search through their content because of the complexity of finding text within an audio stream. Most podcast search sites provide directories of podcasts by subject, category or search only by the metadata provided by the creator of the podcast. PodZinger takes search a step further by searching the spoken words inside the podcast in order to find more specific and relevant results.

As shown in the picture below, each search result also includes excerpts of each search result and also shows the time and context of every occurance of the search keyword. You can also jump to the time showing the keyword you searched for in the video or audio content.

Nice Upsides:

a. PodZinger allows its users to “jump-to” a specific location in the audio and video content without fast forwarding or listening to the entire file as it allows its users to find content based on keyword searches and then skim the results for relevance the same way they would for text.

b. Each PodZinger search result also returns an embedded player allowing you to play content right from the results screen and also removing the need for you to download a podcast before listening to it.

c. PodZinger’s embedded player: You can rewind, fast forward, pause playback or subscribe to that podcast.

d. The service plays in the most popular current browsers including IE(Real Player 9.0 and higher and Windows Media Player), Firefox and Safari(both QuickTime 6.0 and later)

e. Every search is available as an RSS feed, which means that you can now generate a custom feed which notifies you everytime someone says a particular word or phrase

Downsides

a. No speech to text conversion technology is still perfect and PodZinger suffers from the same. If the speech diction in the podcast is unclear or if the speaker has an accent, PodZingers search results are not entirely accurate. Presence of background music in the podcasts or content also might throw off the speech recognition.

b. The number of categories you can search from within YouTube are limited to only 5 categories: Sports, Entertainment, Anime Cartoons, Dance and Poker

c. PodZinger catalogs only around 11,000 podcasts whereas competitors like Podscope’s catalog is around 45,000

Sources of revenue for PodZinger?

In one word: Advertising.

PodZinger offers video ads for advertisers tapping into the exploding volume of online video and audio content market. PodZinger creates an index of the audio and video files and automatically classifies the content. This in turn allows them to give more value to the advertisers using their system by giving them the opportunity to provide more contextual advertising by associating the brands via the search terms with PodZinger indexed in the releated video content. These short ads(5-10 seconds) are displayed inside their mini video player and get served before any content starts to play. Besides Video Ads, they also offer Search Ads which work in a way similar to how Google Adsense works, with ads being served automatically when a user lands on the PodZinger results page.

According to PodZinger’s president Alex Laats 

“A search tool that allows consumers to quickly and easily find the exact information they need, exploits the full value and power of video content. For instance, full text search enables a viable advertising business model for video creators and advertisers looking to monetize their content. We expect to see strong growth in advertising tied to video in the upcoming months as advertisers understand the access they now have thanks to PodZinger.”

Earlier this year, Podzinger announced that users can now search inside YouTube videos with a tab on the front page of PodZinger. This announcement definitely raises the profile of PodZinger. So, say I search for iPhone. PodZinger returns me with 735 relevant search results. In one video, Gadgettes from CNET, the term iPhone was used at 6:36 mark in the video. Pretty impressive! If I am at Apple marketing, and I want to know where iPhone keyword is being used online whether on YouTube or on the geek community, PodZinger would provide me with a good way to accomplish this.

Overall, PodZinger’s ability to search through spoken content is paving the way for the next generation of search similar to Riya’s like.com which uses smart technology to classify pictures instead of depending on Metadata for search results. The inevitable comparison with Google Video Search follows but as of this point of time, PodZinger is definitely way ahead in terms of video search and also providing contexual video ads. PodZingers other competitors besides Google include Podscope and Blinkx but their technology is behind as well.  I still think the search results could be improved and over time, PodZinger definitely has the potential.

del.icio.us |Digg it |Netscape |reddit |StumbleUpon |Yahoo MyWeb |Print This Post