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, → Read More
The popularity of rich media publishing (such as podcasting and videocasting, the YouTube phenomenon, etc.) is a problem for search engines and people trying to use search engines to find this content. The problem is that the traditional ways search engines index and rank content don’t apply to rich media because, well, it’s not easily indexable. A few startups are focusing on creating transcriptions of podcasts and video content (see Pluggd and Podzinger, for example), which search engines can then index. And many people are tagging audio, video and photo content. YouTube, Flickr and others allow this (and see Google’s efforts to tag photos using humans). Tags help describe the content and are usable by search engines as well as humans. But highest level tags, when they are present, don’t capture all of the content, so a lot is missed. Figuring out how to search the meta data around rich content (tags and lots of other descriptive data) is big business. Truveo, a video search startup that launched in 2005 and was subsequently acquired by AOL for at least $50 million, helped solve this problem (but still falls woefully short of perfect). A new unlaunched startup, CastTV, takes rich media searching another few steps forward (much more on them in a later post). But even these new search companies can’t find all of the content in a video or audio file, and certainly can’t take you right to where that content is presented. That’s why I like the idea of deep tagging. It requires human labor but for many publishers it’s worth it. Instead of simply being associated with a file, a deep tag is associated with a clip from the file. Click on the tag and jump right to that part of the clip. We’ve covered a few companies that are facilitating deep tagging, such as MotionBox, JumpCut (acquired by Yahoo last week), Viddler and Click.tv. Also, Google recently added a captioning feature to video, as well as the ability to permanently link to any time spot in a clip. Veotag is doing this as well (we haven’t covered them yet but a few commenters have pointed them out in the past). Today I received an email from Howard Seibel, Veotag’s VP Marketing. He pointed me to this page which is a better version of a TalkCrunch podcast I recorded last week with Om Malik and Robert Scoble. He’s → Read More
Seattle based podcast discovery and management service Pluggd is unveiling a major new feature at DEMO this weekend that combines speech recognition and semantic analysis to let users search for and skip to parts of an audio file that are related to topics of interest to them. It’s more than just speech recognition. This is one of the most compelling examples I’ve seen lately of a growing trend: making multimedia content more granular and letting users take even greater control over the media we consume. We don’t just want to consume what we wish, we want to consume it in the way we wish. Called “Hear Here”, the new feature is only available for use with a single test file this weekend, but CEO Alex Castro told me that with his team’s background in scaling large distributed computing at places like Amazon and Microsoft, they decided to take on the hardest part first – the relevance determination. Pluggd aims to have hundreds of thousands of podcasts analyzed and searchable by the end of the year, all with nothing required of the original publisher. Castro has been working with speech recognition technologies since he was 17 and at Bell Labs. TechCrunch first profiled Pluggd when they launched in June. The company’s basic feature set is very cool, but not as cool as this new search function. They now report having more than 100,000 users and say they’ve seen their monthly uniques grow well ahead of schedule. The company has six full time employees and six part-timers; they’ve raised some angel backing and are working to raise further funding. They’re going to need it to crunch the kind of data this new feature seeks to engage with. Here’s how this new search will work. When users decide they only want to hear a part of a file concerning a given topic, they enter a search term. Pluggd then searches for instances of that term and related terms being used in the file. Relevance is displayed on the file timeline with a heat map, sections of the file most related to your term appear in red, less related in green and unrelated in blue. Hover over any relevant point on the timeline and you’ll see the terms used there that Pluggd determined were related to your search term. Users can click to listen to the file at that point, or select another option → Read More
Seattle based start-up Pluggd opened their podcast directory for public use today; the company aims to make podcast listening easier for nontechnical users. It has several features that I think look great. Company CEO Alex Castro came from Microsoft, with an emphasis in multimedia. The Pluggd team also has members with backgrounds at Real and ESPN.com. Pluggd offers a few things that really differentiate it from other podcast communities. A javascript bookmarklet lets you send podcasts you discover off-site to your Pluggd bookmark list. That list is different from your subscription list so you can evaluate podcasts before subscribing. As I test it, sometimes the bookmarklet works for autodiscovery of podcasts and sometimes it doesn’t. Since the service launched just minutes ago, I hope that will be taken care of soon. The Pluggd search engine actively crawls the web for new podcasts to index, instead of relying only on user submissions. The podcast player can be put in a pop-up from the listening page, so you can navigate around or off of the Pluggd site without breaking the podcast you are listening to. The site design is totally unpretentious without looking unprofessional, too, I like that. The service takes two thematic approaches that are interesting. First, Pluggd believes that social networking and podcast listening work well together. That means that commenting and list sharing are available throughout the site. Second, the company believes that the majority of podcast listeners are listening at work and at school, in a web browser instead of a mobile device. There has been a growing chorus of voices arguing that prime time media consumption hours are shifting from night time to 9 to 5 work hours and Pluggd seems well positioned to respond to that. The podcast directory space couldn’t be much more crowded, but I like this one. Presuming that all the early kinks get worked out, it looks good. → Read More
