pluggd in

Nielsen’s announcement yesterday marks something a lot bigger than just a way to measure the relevance of sites that use AJAX. While folks like Steve Rubel correctly predicted the death of the page view metric some time ago , this new announcement does more: it lays down the foundation for measuring and monetizing the Media Web. This is a great example of the difference between the “fetch-a-page-of-text” web and ad model and the emerging interactive Media Web driven by live, time-variant experiences, like video.

Video context (and user intent) changes from moment to moment, creating additional monetization opportunities. The longer you keep the user around, the more opportunities you have to monetize, if your advertising approach is sophisticated enough to take advantage of that engagement.

One way to keep users around is to give them opportunities to interact with and control their media. Early experiments at DoubleClick shows that users interact with video at an astonishing rate, up to 29%. With our HearHere and SeeHere technology we give users the ultimate incentive to interact and engage, the ability to find what they want, and jump to it.

Once again, giving users control and convenience pays off: In our early deployments we’ve seen providing search increases user time with the media by 200%. For users that actually do search within the show, that goes up to 300%. This means potentially 2-3x more monetization.

Nielsen’s new measurement approach will become even more significant once advertising systems and models catch up. Virtually all ad business on the Internet is still focused on fetch-a-page-of-text, the entire business model was designed when page views still mattered. In this scenario, ad context is determined once and fixed for each show or clip when it is retrieved from the server. This is why, assuming a status quo approach to advertising, webpages seem to monetize better than videos, as this post on NewTeeVee points out.

At Pluggd, we change that by providing additional opportunities to monetize as video context changes and the user interacts and searches. And withSeeHere and HearHere, we help keep the user around to see those ads, because as this announcement from Nielsen points out, minutes are what matter most on the Media Web.

Yesterday, Pluggd and CNet unveiled our HearHere search capability over a sampling of popular ZDnet shows.

It’s exciting, because this is the first time people are able to search within media using a heatmap experience.

Before this, users had two choices: full meal deal or get up from the table.
Now they can find and snack on the tasty chunks they are looking for.

Try it out for yourself by doing a search for “iPhone” or “Apple” on this episode:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=5411

Check out what some folks are saying about the HearHere release:

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/venture/archives/117373.asp
http://venturebeat.com/2007/06/29/pluggd-begins-delivery-of-better-audio-search/
http://mashable.com/2007/06/29/pluggd-launches-audio-search-player-on-cnet/

More to come!

We’re excited to be mentioned in a story in the Economist today about
speech recognition. The article does a good job of surveying the space, but
what really makes Pluggd different (and speech reco useful for video search)
is the chunking technology we’ve developed (read more about chunks).

It’s great to see the company getting highlighted this way in such an
outstanding publication.

- Alex Castro

We got some questions about what these chunk-things are after my last post. Some folks asked how this is different from just searching for the utterance of a word in video. It’s quite a bit different. Matt Marshall at Venture Beat did a good job describing how Pluggd works in this post (http://venturebeat.com/2006/12/06/pluggd-perfects-audio-and-video-search-raises-165m/) after we last spoke with him.

Let’s dig into this a little more by investigating user intention. When a user searches within video for the word ‘golf’, are they thinking, “The person who created this video has really good enunciation, I wonder how they pronounce the word ‘golf’?” I don’t think so. This is the type of user experience enabled by using speech recognition by itself.

Instead, the user’s intention is more likely to be, “I am really interested in golf, find me the segment within this video where golf is talked about.” This requires identifying a distinct and relevant conversation, what we call a ‘chunk’, within the video. Speech recognition alone isn’t enough to accomplish this. We combine speech recognition with some very interesting semantic analysis and information retrieval techniques to identify chunks. We are able to identify a chunk by recognizing when related words and word phrases (e.g. golf, Tiger Woods, green, Vijay Singh, under par, over par) are used in sequence within an area of video.

There are several interesting implications of chunking:

1) Far superior results than speech recognition by itself

Because we are using the presence of related words, as opposed to the presence of a single word, we are able to achieve results that are far superior to even the best speech recognition engines.

The diagram below illustrates how this works for a scenario where a user searches for a chunk by typing in the query term - “Vijay Singh.” The word phrase “Vijay Singh” might prove difficult for a speech recognition engine, including the one we use, to identify. However, our chunking technology compensates for this.

2) Increases a user’s media consumption

Because users can jump to exactly what they are interested within the video, they don’t ‘bail out’ of the video. Users often start watching a video clip only to become frustrated when they don’t immediately see what they were expecting, and they are too impatient to wait for the video segment they do care about. They just leave. Our experiments show that a very high number of users ‘bail out’ of video within the first 30 seconds.

By allowing users to jump to what they are interested in, users become satisfied, and spend more time watching more of the video. In fact, we’ve found evidence that users display some of the ‘browsing’ behavior in video that they exhibit with hyperlinks and text web pages. In a future post, I will share empirical data from some of the AB testing we’ve conducted over the past few months.

- Alex Castro

Google’s uber search across text, images and now video has a lot of people talking, including the New York Times. But the enthusiasm ignores how people really use search.

Searching includes not only finding results, but also figuring out which results you want. Google’s text search does a good job of highlighting a web page to help you determine which results fit your needs. People then “ping-pong” back and forth between search results and web pages to find what they’re looking for. This works because most of us can scan text very quickly.

Applying this experience to video is a disaster. You shouldn’t have to spend 3 minutes (the average length of a YouTube clip) watching a video to see if it is the one you want. In our research we’ve found the median viewing (or listening) time for a show is less than 10 seconds; when people don’t see what they want, they move on. So if you’re looking for a gem that is buried a minute into the show, forget it. It just doesn’t get found.

At Pluggd, we chunk audio and video. What’s a chunk? The part you want. We are the only ones that let you jump right to the tasty chunk you are looking for. A three minute video can feel like an eternity, which is why so many people bail in that first 10 seconds. We just don’t think you should have to sit around and wait for the good parts.

Pluggd is on a mission to chunk all video and audio for bite-sized consumption. More to come.

- Alex Castro

Today, Pluggd was awarded with a spot on the AlwaysOn Media Top 100 list. This is an awesome honor!!! Here’s a little bit about the list:

AO Media 100 is a power list of the top private digital media companies. Pluggd was handpicked by the AO Media editorial team based on a set of five criteria–innovation, market potential, customer adoption, media buzz and investor value creation.

Read more about the top 100 here

We’d like to thank Tony Perkins, Ryan Brenner, and the AO team for including us on this high power list!

_drew

Alex Castro and Cornelius Willis were hanging out with the folks over at Wired today.

They answered some reader questions, check it out!

If you have any questions that weren’t answered you can always hit us up at support (at) pluggd.com

_drew

Blogged with Flock

Yep, check it out y’all. New episodes of the ESPN Sportscenter podcast are searchable using the Pluggd “HearHere” technology. This badboy is going to be available sitewide so soon it keeps me awake at night thinking about all of the podcasts I’ll be searching through.

Like the Patriots? Fire up the player and search for them. You will not only find specific mentions of the Patriots, but any terms that have to do with them. You’ll get returns like “Branch”, “Tom Brady”, and even the team that the Patriots played this week.

It’s freaking hot, go check it out for yourself!

http://www.pluggd.com/demo

-drew

digg this

UPDATE: What podcast will you search on and what will you search for?

Blogged with Flock

Pluggd’s HearHere allows people to jump to the exact position in audio or video, such as podcasts and video casts, where there is something they want to hear. People have come to expect this instant return with web pages, but up until now audio and video have failed to deliver the same searchability. Now, you will no longer have to listen to five minutes of an NPR podcast before you reach the topic you care about. HearHere changes everything.

Check out the video of Alex and JT’s DEMOfall ‘06 presentation from San Diego this week. And while you’re there, check out some of the other awesome new stuff out there!!!

http://www.demo.com/demonstrators/demo2006fall/79916.php

_drew olanoff