Multicast Unlocks Vital Information Inside Audio and Video Via Veotag

New offering makes it easy to expose content within videos and audios to consumers and search engines, and to enable people to go directly to what interests them most

ATLANTA—Promising to radically change how publishers create, and consumers access, content in online videos, audios and webcasts, Multicast today announced the acquisition of the Veotag technology, which makes content easier to find, engages people longer, and lets them quickly reach the information that's relevant to them.

"Everyone knows video is high impact and can deliver information in compelling ways. But even so, people tend to be impatient and prefer not to watch entire videos—or listen to entire audios—when they aren't certain that there's a payoff for doing so," said Lou Schwartz, CEO of Multicast. "To pull out valuable ideas you may have to watch or listen to the entire presentation several times. If you want to use the material as a reference, you have to remember where the content you want is, and use clunky slider controls to imprecisely rewind. People just don't have the patience for that, and as a result, the value of the information in videos and audios isn't fully realized."

Schwartz continued, "This technology creates more valuable videos and audios by exposing what's in the asset to consumers, which increases people's willingness to stick with the content, and by enabling people to jump right to the information they most want. That makes the hunt for on-target information and ideas incredibly more efficient, and drives more traffic to the web page, the video or audio, and even the specific content within the media."

Veotag is used by some of America's largest companies including Astra-Zeneca Pharmaceuticals, Bearing Point, the Better Business Bureau, Ernst & Young and the University of Pennsylvania.

Veotag changes consumers' online media experience from requiring start-to-finish viewing to a more interactive and productive one. The technology is applicable for many users, including training, the delivery of information about products, speeches and events, and corporate communications. In general, any video or audio of more than five minutes duration can benefit from being Veotagged.

The process for creating more interactive digital media assets is straightforward:

1) Video and audio publishers add "metadata" in the form of summary sentences, titles, keywords or other text at points where there is vital information. For example, a 10-minute equipment repair video may be given a section labeled "How to Remove Parts" at time sequence 3:30 and "How to Test" at 5:42. Additional markers can be placed within each section.

2) These markers appear in a table of contents format on the right side of the player, linked to the appropriate content. Consumers can see what is coming, and can simply click the links to jump to the content of greatest personal interest and relevance.

3) Publishers can also enhance the content with synchronized slides, and can make supporting documents or Web pages and other content—all available from links within the player.

No special technical skills are needed to mark content or to add ancillary materials. The same asset can be associated with more than one set of metadata, enabling it to be easily tailored for more than one target audience. The players in which the content appears can be modified via style sheets and more significantly via programming to establish a custom, branded look.

Veotag publishers also can use searches to create, save and share audio and video mixes of content on a particular topic. This makes it possible to easily view all the scenes in a video library featuring a specific person, or to listen to all the segments in a series of audios in which a particular topic is discussed.

Veotag also increases the value of videos and audios by making their content visible to internal and popular Internet search engines. Search engines can't "see" what is inside a video or audio, and so the bulk of the content isn't considered in searches. All of the metadata created by Veotag publishers is visible to the engines, improving the ranking of the media for the topics it focuses on, and causing the media to appear on searches from more words. In addition, because each marker can be a distinct URL, consumers who access the media via these links are not forced to watch the entire presentation to see the information they want, they can jump directly to the desired content from organic search results.

Veotag works with all the major audio and video formats, such as QuickTime, Flash, Windows Media, and MP3. It is compatible with both PC and Apple platforms.

"Not long ago, our business focused on delivering online video. As that technology has matured, our full-service approach has led us to provide a more complete multimedia communications offering for our clients. Multicast will use Veotag to create entirely new opportunities for our clients and help them achieve their information delivery goals," said Schwartz. "With Veotag, we're increasing the return on investment in their video productions by extending the content's lifespan. We're opening up expertise and information that would have been gathering 'digital dust' on some obscure Web page and making it accessible for years to come."

Samples of Veotag-enhanced videos can be found at www.veotag.com.