• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 8, 2008

FOXSports.com on MSN has tapped EveryZing's technology to give sports fans the ability to search for specific keywords in video clips online.

The Cambridge, Mass. video search company makes speech recordings searchable through its speech-to-text recognition software ezSEO that wraps audio from videos in metadata that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft search engines can index.

Through content feeds, EveryZing downloads videos from FOXSports.com about every 10 minutes. The processing engine translates the video's audio into text, building a transcript of the clip. It pulls keywords from concepts such as people, places and things, creating metadata tags and building index pages that live on FOXSports.com.

"You have all this content locked inside what I call a Flash ghetto that Google can't access," said Tom Wilde, CEO at EveryZing. "The concept to make it searchable is so simple. You just flatten out the video and make the high-quality audio and visuals searchable, so Google, Yahoo and Microsoft can go after it."

Originally developed for the U.S. government by Cambridge, Mass.-based research firm BBN Technologies, the technology lets users click on the written text of the spoken words in the video to find the exact place in the clip where the searched words appear. The text is time-stamped and marked on the timeline of the video for easy access.

Creating this precision timeline that allows users to find the exact point in the video meant generating 1,395 topics for FoxSports.com by statistically analyzing their content.

EveryZing's technology has indexed about 20,000 pages on Google for Fox during the last four months.

About one-third of video is consumed by people navigating directly to Web sites like FOXSports.com, another third is from social media, and the remainder comes from search engines such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, Wilde said, citing Hitwise stats.

EveryZing, formally branded Podzinger, was spun off from the government security contractor and research firm BBN Technology to create a consumer-facing tool that made podcasts and video searchable.

The technology has enabled EveryZing to power search for DallasCowboys.com. A video player on the site snaps a thumbnail photo of the clip to create a visual storyboard. Fan can build their own video from clips, email to friends, bookmark or embed into a blog or MySpace page by copying and dropping in the code.

Akin to the road music labels traveled, professional broadcasters are worried about people stealing and uploading their content to YouTube, Wilde said. "Consumers don't want to steal video content," he said. "They want to clip, share and make it easy to find. So video producers need to provide consumers with an easy path to their content, because if someone finds an easier path than you, they will push you out of the loop."