Commentary: The Year of Video Search
A final reason, and perhaps most interesting one for the corporate space, is the merging of presentation delivery tools, Webcasting, and search technologies. Three players in this space—Accordent, Sonic Foundry, and Pictron—offer similar but nuanced differences. Accordent is the most straightforward, offering PowerPoint and VGA capture alongside audio and video streaming; what it lacks in search capabilities it makes up in ease of use. As the number of captured sessions or video files increases, the need for Accordent to present a search solution will become more acute.
Sonic Foundry and Pictron both have roots in video search. Sonic Foundry’s main product line—Mediasite—comes out of a company of the same name that focused on video search, including GPS tracking, in the late 1990s. While the company still retains the search technologies, the shift to Mediasite’s self-labeled "rich media recorder" was an intentional move to establish an easy-to-use device that would create a critical mass of content. The penetration of this device in medical and higher education institutions, along with the recent launch of mediasite.com, a high-level catalog of rich media content with basic search functionality, seems to indicate that search is becoming more critical to Sonic Foundry’s long-term strategy.
Perhaps the best-positioned of the three, however, is Pictron, a small company that has quietly endured the onslaught of its two biggest early competitors—Virage and Excalibur/Convera—to win a respectable position in video search. The systems are in use across corporate, broadcast, and government facilities, including clients as varied as ABC News, the Federal Reserve Bank, and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Just as Google focused on its core strength and is branching out into video and other practical by-products of its core search technologies, Pictron has begun quietly to build on its video search success by integrating PowerPoint and Webcast capture into a mature search engine that indexes scene changes (video cuts), facial recognition, speech-to-text, closed-caption text, object recognition, and PowerPoint metadata.
While Accordent and Sonic Foundry both offer VGA capture (a series of still images captured from a laptop or desktop’s VGA output), neither yet provides optical character recognition of VGA capture. Pictron has not yet ventured into VGA capture but would probably be compelled to if these two newer competitors begin to tout search as a differentiator.
In summary, 2006 holds great promise for digital video and streaming media. Yet, alongside the move to a video-centric Web, tools such as robust video search engines must keep pace with the growth in content. Otherwise, we’ll all be left wondering exactly where we left that last episode of Lost or our CEO’s earnings announcement streaming clips.
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