Streaming Media - December 2007/January 2008 - (Page 52) the search is on to have video search on their [sites], but don’t have the R&D budget to do it themselves.” Searching for the Big Engines So if there is so much money in multimedia ads and Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube, many wonder why the big search portals are still sitting on the sidelines. The consensus is that sooner rather than later, one of the big players will enter the game, and as soon as one gets involved it will raise the profile of these smaller multimedia search players for the others. TVEyes’ Ives doesn’t understand what they are waiting for. “Video search has not been tackled by large players and this is fascinating to me. In five years, we won’t distinguish between video and text search. We’ll just call Figure 5. Coveo can find search term within videos across a SharePoint site as in this sample searching for it search, but this will require one of the big the word “SharePoint.” search engines to step up to the plate and offer something other than the metadata tag search we are experiencing today,” he says. “I’m surprised it hasn’t happened. I can’t explain it, other than to say it will require a significant amount of hardware and software and no one has taken the leap. It won’t be that way for long. One and a half billion dollars is a lot of money and that has to be recouped, and displaying non-relevant banner ads at the top of the page won’t recoup that investment,” Ives adds. Podzinger’s Laats thinks companies like his will attract customers looking for a better multimedia search experience and force the big search engines to look for better solutions than they offer today. Even though the big search players “are text search guys, they recognize the need to improve multimedia significantly. Podzinger and others are improving it and creating an advertisingbased model. Our ability to resolve these Figure 6. To deliver targeted video clips of NFL players to fantasy football fans via Sprint, GoTuit uses people to index games as issues very rapidly as compared to the bigger, they happen an approach that is much more accurate than machine encoding. (See sidebar on page 54 for more about Gotuit.) slower-moving guys like Google and Yahoo! will create customer adoption to the point where the thing we do with search will have to be in all these other places,” he says. how rapidly the landscape changes. Once upon a time, What’s more, Ives and Laats believe that whenever Sherman says, Lycos blew away the competitors by one of the big search companies gets involved, it will offering a two-line summary, an “advancement” we find only benefit companies with existing technology simplistic today. In the not-too-distant future, it seems we because those that are left out of multimedia search will will look back at the current state of multimedia search come looking for an existing solution. Laats says, “If and smile. In spite of some incredible technological Google announced something tomorrow, I would be progress, once the big search companies become excited because it would validate what we do. Google involved, it will change everything; it has the potential to has strong competitors that need to match [one another] shift the entire search-based revenue model. and we bring a turnkey solution that can scale rapidly.” There will come a time, as Ives pointed out, when text, Ron Miller (ronsmiller@ronsmiller.com) is a freelance technology video, and audio files will appear in the same set of writer based in Massachusetts. search results, but we still have a ways to go. One thing Comments? Email us at letters@streamingmedia.com, or check the we have learned over the last couple of decades is just masthead for other ways to contact us. 52 STREAMING MEDIA December 2007/January 2008
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