[Infowarrior] - Search and Co-Opt

[Richard Forno]

Search and Co-Opt

PodZinger has a way out of the Web-video conundrum: Make piracy pay.
From: Issue 115 | May 2007 | Page 53 | By: Adam L. Penenberg
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/115/open_next-tech_Printer_Friendly.html

There are two ways to confront the pirating of copyrighted material on the
Web. One, pioneered by the music industry and embraced now by Hollywood,
throws lawyers in the path of digital progress. Every month, NBC Universal
demands that YouTube remove snippets from some of the network's most popular
shows. Likewise, Viacom, whose cable properties include MTV and Comedy
Central, recently filed a $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube for "massive
copyright infringement." That may keep the lawyers fat and happy, but it
doesn't accomplish much else.

The other approach, conceived by PodZinger, a video-search startup in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, is this: Co-opt the pirates. Unleash them to
spread your media virally, and let PodZinger track viewership--and kick back
ad revenue. That makes "piracy" profitable to the copyright holder.

At the core of PodZinger's proposed solution is video search, a problem it
has largely cracked. (Other upstarts such as Blinkx have too, though they
tackle it from different angles.) Harnessing 30 years' worth of
government-funded R&D in speech recognition--the company is a spin-off of
BBN Technologies, a high-tech military contractor that helped create
ARPANET, forerunner of the Internet--PodZinger spiders the Web looking for
videos and dissects RSS feeds for updates. When it finds a match, it uses
voice recognition (juiced by algorithms known as "hidden Markov models" that
bet on the probability of a word given its pronunciation and grammatical
context) to create a rough transcript of the audio, then classifies the
content by topic.

That's vastly different from Google and Yahoo's approach. They simply scan a
video's metatags, the words that describe a video file. Although PodZinger's
transcripts are currently only 70% accurate, its approach has the potential
to transform the search business. For users, PodZinger's Web site offers the
ability--finally--to plug in a search term, then skim the results as they
would text; click on a word, and they're taken to that exact place in the
video. Of course, with billions of Web pages, PodZinger hasn't come close to
ferreting out everywhere videos lurk, but its reach is growing: On YouTube
alone, PodZinger transcribes some 20,000 new posts each day. For advertisers
(there are only a few at this early stage), the company has copied a page
out of Google's playbook, offering the video equivalent of keyword ads based
on what users search for.

But the real revolution might be for the copyright holder: PodZinger's
spiders will in time be able to track down specific video content on
command--a clip from last night's Daily Show, for example, or everything
that belongs to Comedy Central--and insert an ad into each segment, no
matter where it is playing. In other words, PodZinger could force each and
every YouTuber to watch a short commercial if they want to see the clip they
asked for, then tally the number of times it's played so the advertiser
could pay the copyright holder directly. And what if the person posting the
material doesn't want the ad? Tough luck; it's not his video.

In essence, PodZinger wants to make allies of what are now two opposing
parties. "Bootlegging is going to happen anyway," says Alex Laats,
PodZinger's CEO. "Why not make money in a reasonable way? If people can get
paid for their content, and you can track when it is viewed, and
advertisements can deliver their brand message, then who cares?" As Laats
sees it, this way, everyone stands to benefit from the video boom: The
copyright holders, the pirates, the fans, and PodZinger, which would skim a
few cents off the top.

The man behind PodZinger's speech recognition is BBN chief scientist John
Makhoul, who is originally from Lebanon and received a PhD in electrical
engineering from MIT. Back in the 1970s, Makhoul and his team started with
50 words, mostly numbers. It took a decade before a computer could string
these 50 words together, deciding that a word was, given its context and
phonetic pronunciation, the mot juste. Now Makhoul has developed a tool that
helps intelligence analysts scour foreign television broadcasts in Chinese,
Arabic, and Spanish and translate them into English. The software can even
identify a speaker's unique speech characteristics so that, for example,
Osama bin Laden tapes aired on Al Jazeera can be instantly tagged. Of
course, it's not perfect. Depending on the speaker's accent, "Iraq" can end
up "a rock," "in person" can be rendered "in prison," and "how to light for
portraiture" can become "how to light for torture."

PodZinger says it's aiming for 90% accuracy in a few years. In the meantime,
its basic plan "is a good one, an ingredient in an as-yet-unbaked economic
cake," says John Battelle, author of The Search and chairman of Federated
Media, a blog-publishing company based in California. "Everyone in the movie
and television business wants an iTunes to happen but doesn't want Steve
Jobs to control it." PodZinger offers "a new way to break-dance," Battelle
says.

PodZinger has not yet signed up a major entertainment industry content
partner--a Universal or Viacom--to try out this scheme, although it has a
number of lesser-known customers. Eventually, though, the studios and
networks will have to confront the wildfire proliferation of Web video. More
than 110 million U.S. Internet users streamed almost 7 billion videos in
August 2006, according to comScore. It's exploding not just at YouTube and
TMZ, but also on news sites such as MarketWatch and the online editions of
The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.
Bloggers often double as "vloggers," MySpacers shoot and edit their own
movie podcasts, and Dabble encourages its Dabblers to collect and organize
their favorite flicks, which they can store online.

No one's going to control all that. But we can make sense of it. And smart
companies might just profit from it.
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