When your tagline is the Internet’s most comprehensive video search, you better deliver.
My acid test for all video search sources is a quick one for WatchMojo.com. Since we produce a lot of content and syndicate it all over the Web, I can quickly see how a search service gets its content and how far it digs up.
Today we look at Vezoom, a product of Monetize Media: “your query watchmojo.com found 1641 videos”. We have about 4000 clips, so that’s a decent catch.
A little side note, when you try to copy and paste any data, you can’t. Which is odd, because video search companies build their value on top of other people’s content, yet this site objects to you copying and pasting any data, but, I digress.
Vezoom is wading into a very competitive market: search players such as Blinkx and Pixsy are trying to become leaders in the space, and both leverage metadata in RSS fields to index video content, as does Vezoom. Then there are many other players like Mefeedia, Dabble, Clipblast, SearchforVideo. Oh, did I mention Google, too? Each one is different in its own way, for sure, but in search, the technology is secondary to distribution. Unless you can put your product in front of an audience, I don’t think you have a long term prayer.
To Please the Lawyers
Disclaimer #1: we index both Blinkx and Pixsy in Mojo Supreme’s meta video search, MetaMojo.com (whose other produst is a vertical search network). At some point we could technically be indexing all of the sources in this post.
Disclaimer #2: we run the MetaMojo.com which very broadly competes in this space, but as you can see from Disclaimer #1, it’s a collaboration and not a competition with us.
Disclaimer #3: We produce video content at WatchMojo.com, and most of these sources index us directly or the syndication partners we distribute our clips to.
Would we include Vezoom in MetaMojo.com’s meta video search?
Don’t see why not… though ultimately, for better or worse, I suspect that Blinkx (who seems to be moving towards hosting content as well), Pixsy and Vezoom largely return the same data based on the same metadata.
Waiting for Turning Point in Video Navigation (or did we miss it?)
In other words, we’re still waiting for the tipping point in video search and navigation. With text content, some consider Google’s PageRank as being the leading force while others think that the moment came when Yahoo! chose to power its results with Google, trumping the fledgling startup to the top of the heap.
In video search, no one stands out. Though by buying the top file sharing and hosting service YouTube and owning 50% market share in search, Google is king of the mountain no matter how you look at the market.
Regardless, some highlights of Vezoom, from the press release:
With the myVeZoom personal video engine, this problem is solved by the creation of channeled video feeds scoured from both UGC and professionally produced content. (…)
The myVeZoom personal video engine saves users the daily hassle of trying to find what online video interests them. Your myVeZoom page becomes a custom tailored video channels experience that updates dynamically. You can even create your own channel on the fly by entering a keyword. Instantly your channel is generated right before your eyes. MyVeZoom is YOUR video WHEN and WHERE you want it. Once set-up, myVeZoom becomes one-stop access to see your video favorites without searching.
Currently myVeZoom offers over 60 online video channels. The usual suspects are here; YouTube, CNN, ESPN, Yahoo! and Google as well as some more obscure video sites such as Stupid Video, Video Spotter, and AniBoom. Users select the channels from a list of available category options, and then personalize the layout of the page by dragging and dropping their favorites into position. MyVeZoom continuously monitors over 18 million hours of online video for videos of relevance, providing new content for the user based on their favorite selected channels.
Notice the 18M hours? What does that mean?
Does Size Matter?
Well, to put it into context, Blinkx just months ago bragged about 6M hours… and now, on its site, it’s up to 14M hours.
For a second, this reminds me of how in Search Wars 2003-05 Yahoo! and Google bragged about the respective size of their index. At one point, Google claimed 8B pages, Yahoo! countered with 16B pages. Wow. More crap? Thanks.
Let’s face it: size does not matter… and I respectfully think the video competitors are going about this the wrong way by trying to index more and more hours of video because as you can see with the WatchMojo.com example, our 100+ hours of content is probably ubiquitous and on numerous sources… we’re a professional producer of content, when it comes to UGC or pirated content, there is a duplication of content as well… so by aiming for more hours, you are effectively creating a redundant database of content.
How about the one video I want in lieu of the same video from 4 different sources.
What if a video source could differentiate between UGC and professional content.
Blending File Sharing Features with Search
Much the same way that some video file sharing sites allow users to create channels and playlists… this is a search company that is trying to mesh those features of file sharing sites with search.
Will it work? I don’t know.
But it’s a very early stage in video so the more players, the better. So check out Vezoom and compare to the other players.
What will be the Brass Ring Look Like?
All I know is that there seems to be a crazy amount of supply of file sharing sites, video search… determining which ones will win and which ones will lose is a hard thing to do. It’s hit or miss, and frankly, at this juncture, with video ads being anywhere from a $4.3B to $10B market, I’m not even sure what the prize is. Then again, will the winners be search companies or the file sharing sites.
You know my bias: I think good content companies that are essentially agnostic to any one technology, platform, distribution point or search company will win, and I know of one pretty aggressive one out there…
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August 3rd, 2007 at 3:00 pm
Ash, thanks for the great post. You said “Today we look at Vezoom, a product of Monetize Media: “your query watchmojo.com found 1641 videos”. We have about 4000 clips, so that’s a decent catch.” You also said that anyone that claims “Internet’s most comprehensive video search” better deliver. So we did our own test against Pixsy and Blinkx and for good measure Google Video to see if our claim stands the test.
Drumroll please….here are the results on the same query:
Blinkx returned: 68 Results
Pixsy retunred: 172 Results
Google Video: 828 Results
VeZoom.com: 1641 Results
We stand by our claim. I propose a Search Off between all the new video search engines to see who not only returns the MOST results, but the MOST RELEVANT results. Gentlemen start your (search)engines!!