• by Ross Fadner , June 16, 2008

Smaller publishers face a real uphill battle when it comes to video search, panelists at the OMMA Video show said on Monday. The question of how you get that “Google juice”, as moderator Andy Plesser of BeetTV called it, is a pivotal one for video publishers, and it falls on them to maximize their content for search engine crawlers.

For the moment, text search is still king for video search, which means publishers need to make sure they've applied as much meta data as they can to their videos so they'll turn up in search results on sites like YouTube.

But Bill Stratton, COO of DigitalSmiths, points out that text won't rule video search forever.As such, companies such as his are mining richer audio and visual data from their network of video publishers, and using their technology to aggregate mountains of data that can be used for functions such as selling targeted ads and delivering content recommendations in addition to searching for video. As Stratton said, “trying to identify what the products are is part of our challenge.”