Video Metadata: The Key to Discoverability and Much More

Having excellent videos on your site isn't enough if people can't find them. Think about it: search engines work by searching on text. To get them to understand what your videos are all about -- and to index your videos in their rankings -- you need to tell them.

That's where metadata comes in.

During the recent Brightcove global customer conference, Tom Wilde, CEO of Ramp, spoke about the importance of accurate metadata. He knows what he's talking about: Ramp specializes in creating and managing time-based metadata. This five-year-old company celebrated it's first cash-positive quarter in Q4 of 2011, definitely a major event.

Video metadata is good for more than just search results, explained Wilde. It unlocks the value of a video. Besides offering improved search engine results, it leads to more engaged viewers, and even improves monetization, since publishers are able to offer improved ad targeting to advertisers.

Ramp works mostly with major media companies that rely on automated solutions. Automating the process of creating metadata for a large number of videos helps drive down the cost and improves return on investment (ROI).

No matter how it gets added, though, video metadata delivers measurable results.

"We know from our studies that the presence of transcripts and tags drives 40 to 300 percent more video engagement with end-users," said Wilde.

Advertisers also use metadata to create brand safety lists, so they know their ads are showing only on content acceptable to that brand. That kind of ad targeting is just taking off.

"The ability for advertisers to target ads using metadata is next up," said Wilde. "It's become a multi-billion dollar industry around text. The same thing will happen around video. As advertisers look for more targetability and better performance for their advertisements."

Video metadata will only grow in importance as mobile computing continues to expand.

"We see lots of growth ahead for things like second-screen and augmented television applications, where again understanding what's inside the video unlocks the ability to associate other kinds of related content to that video, both on-demand and in live scenarios, too," explained Wilde.

To view the full interview, scroll down (used courtesy of Beet.TV).

Troy Dreier's article first appeared on OnlineVideo.net