By Allan Maurer
DULLES, VA—Grab Networks, formed from the merger of Anystream and Voxant in 2008, sees extraordinary growth opportunities in its solutions for turning digital video content into dollars. The company plans to expand its already impressive market share on the heels of a $12 million funding.
Marcien Jenckes, president of the company and former CEO of Voxant, tells TechJournal South that the 100-plus employee company has three main lines of business.
They are an enterprise software division, the former Voxant media business with 70,000 publishers, and a new hosted software business launched at the beginning of this year.
The company helps media firms such as Huffington Post and People Magazine grab “The right online video at the right place at the right time,” says Jenckes, which is something that presents “a lot of hurdles.”
Grab Network’s technology streamlines and simplifies the process for 700 of the world’s largest media companies. “Any media company can use our software to manage its video and make it available across its own site or someone else’s,” says Jenckes.
Doing that without help can be difficult, he points out, because “Reformatting for content syndication is expensive. Only a small part of professional video ends up on the web. Local TV stations do eight to ten hours of video a day, but put only a few clips on the web.
“Someone has to edit them, they have to be reformatted and if it isn’t done quickly enough, no one cares. Even if they do get it online, there is rarely enough metadata so it can be found or advertised against.”
When video is loaded on a media firm’s site, it can’t be controlled and it can end up on YouTube, where the originating firm can’t serve its own ads against it and even competitors can pick it up.
All told, only about 15 percent of professional video content ever makes it online, the company says.
Grab solves those problems for its clients. “We give them their own tools,” says Jenckes, “we give them access to our syndication network and we empower the creation of a video catalog they can share across their own company or with partners. Content owners can apply rules and permissions to their content.”
Grab also helps firms monetize their video content through a variety of services, both by working with a number of advertising networks and by selling ads itself.
Grab also offers a central place for the firms to put their video assets with the rules and permissions applied, “So they end up in the right place and hit the right consumer with the right monetization,” says Jenckes.
The company’s software will also automatically edit video clips, taking a broadcast signal off the air and pre-clipping it into relevant segments with metadata applied.
“As we process the video, we look at about 40 tracks of information, providing a speech to text transcript, optical character recognition on graphics, facial recognition of people or anchors in the video, and scene detection to deliver services like search within to find a term inside the video.”
The software then runs analytics on the information collected to decide what it is about and assign metadata to it, which is used to clip it appropriately.
“There is a bunch of behind the door rocket science going on to extract that information from the video in a quick way,” says Jenckes. That same metadata is then used for ad targeting, search engine optimization, and serving the video in appropriate contexts.
When the company landed its recent funding, CEO Fred Singer said, “We felt strongly that to tackle this problem some company had to step up and bring together massively scalable software solutions, with massively scalable licensed content that could be syndicated across the broader web and monetized by the biggest advertisers.
“Only then could we finally help media companies generate digital dollars, not just digital pennies. That cannot be done without a whole new video infrastructure on the web, not just for advertising but video itself.”
Online: www.grabnetworks.com
Previously on TechJournal South:
Grab Networks wraps up $12M funding http://techjournalsouth.com/news/article.html?item_id=7542
Anystream merges with Voxant
http://techjournalsouth.com/news/article.html?item_id=6145
Voxant’s newsroom syndicates the most content
http://techjournalsouth.com/news/article.html?item_id=4055
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