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Searching for video online - September 21, 2007

Media Wonk attended two breakfast discussions in New York this week on marketing and monetization models online (moderating one) and a common refrain was heard at each: Video search still sucks.

It sucks so much, in fact, that it threatens to retard the development of the online video business. But some clever online marketers and content distributors are coming up with new tools to make sure their intended audiences find their content.

"Video search is horrible right now," CBS Interactive executive producer Adam Elend said at Gotham Media Ventures' latest Digital Breakfast panel (co-sponsored by Content Agenda).

Elend is co-creator of the online financial series Wallstrip, which has found a way to leverage text search on behalf of its video content.

"We highlight a stock a day, and stocks of course have ticker symbols," Elend said. "So we're able to rely in part on [text-based] ticker search to make sure we're indexing well."

At the Jack Myers Breakfast at Michael's sponsored by Media Business Report  publisher Myers Publishing, CBS Interactive exec VP Patrick Keane called better search technology, "mission critical" for online video to succeed.

"Search is how people navigate the web today, especially with the proliferation of toolbars and embedded search tools. If you're not searchable you're really off the radar for a lot of people."

But there wasn't a lot of optimism that the lack of good video search tools will be solved anytime soon. Some analysts, in fact, seem to be hoping to leapfrog the whole problem and move on to some next-generation approach to exposing content online.

"I think the next big evolution [in online video] will be, how do get from serving people who are pro-actively searching for content to serving people who don't know what they want to watch, like traditional television," Bear Stearns analyst Spencer Wang said.

"That's the huge challenge," Veoh Networks CEO Steve Mitgang added. "Search really doesn't work very well for video, at least not yet, so you need other ways to get content out there.

Not everyone is pessimistic, though. Ogilvy Worldwide VP, digital influence Rohit Bhargava reminded the Gotham Media breakfast that not many years ago, "there wasn't a very good way to index text content either until some smart people figured it out."

According to Bhargava, "there's a lot of information out there about the substance of video content," like user-applied tags, social network discussions and voting sites like Digg. "It's just a question of harnessing that information for search purposes."

Smart people only need apply.
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