Moving Pictures: The New Search

If you’re a video creator/provider, there are now specialized video search engines that will pick up your content and make it available for those inveterate searchers that always want more. At a recent Search Engine Strategies Conference, three execs from video search engines - Suranga Chandratillake from blinkx, Karen Howe from Singingfish, and John Thrall from Yahoo! Search - were pretty much unified on one thing: it’s still ‘early days’ for video search, and that is good. Because now is the perfect time to create and optimize content for this nascent, burgeoning category.

All three companies are hard at work enhancing their lists of content partners, providing platforms for video bloggers, support for Media RSS (fostering openness and choice for independent video publishers interested in promoting/syndicating content), and more. The optimizing hysteria is soon to begin, of course: meta information, smart file naming, page content, audio transcripts for Google use – you’ll hear all about it soon.

It’s really interesting to think about if, or how the advertising ballgame will change with this. Right now, video is still mostly linear, which is why the interactive go-anywhere of the web is so popular. But it’s not a far leap to think of non-linear interactive video, is it? So far, we’ve all seen those uber-cool TV ads that are so well made, they just have to transcend the living room and get in our mailboxes. Like that Honda ad, for example.

As far as the corporate space is concerned, it wasn’t so long ago that video search was called ‘non mission-critical’, or that digital video capture had not yet reached ‘critical mass’ within the organization. This year, however, is clearly one where video search itself will reach that critical mass. The merging of presentation delivery tools, Webcasting, and Search technologies takes this further (see Tim Siglin’s commentary).

All of this sounds great, but here’s the usual roadblock: monetization. It seems clear that since Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google Adwords have turned web search into a money-spinner, video analytics is only a few short hops away. Advertisers, after all, have to be able to measure quality and quantity of this emerging audience.