This is one in a series of special reports for “Survival Guide 2: Radio’s New Media Leaders,” a supplement to the Sept. 24, 2008 issue.
(click thumbnail)Gregg LindahlCox Radio’s Vice President, Interactive & New Technologies Gregg Lindahl uses very few words as he explains why Cox considers the EveryZing applications important: “It makes the ephemeral perpetual.”
How, exactly, the EveryZing technology does that requires a few more words.
EveryZing for years has been active in the process of creating speech to text transcriptions. Around that expertise, the company has created products to index media content from radio, television, motion pictures and other sources, and to search those indexes.
For Cox and other media companies there have long been ways of putting their content up on the Internet. But just because a media file is up there doesn’t help a listener or viewer can find it.
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The problem, in a nutshell, is that Internet search capability is text-based, while media files themselves are not.
EveryZing’s speech recognition capabilities are allowing Cox to create a word-for-word text transcript, which can be searched, in real time
“We get a chance to append all of our unique content, through broadcast and stream, with text, which makes it discoverable and will lead to more consumption of the product,” Lindahl said.
Each word in the transcript is time-stamped, so searching for that word not only takes the listener to the media file itself, which can be dozens of minutes long, but to the exact point in the file where the word itself appears.
Applications from EveryZing’s RAMP (Reach, Access, Monetization and Protection) suite provide Cox the means to deploy a standard set of tools that allow each station to manage their individual content collections and maintain their own customized Web sites.
The Web pages created with the media files are search engine-friendly, allowing station content to be discovered by outside general search engines as well as the ezSEARCH application EveryZing supplies for the station’s own site.
“We are able to leverage the unique content assets from our terrestrial broadcasts on the Web and significantly enhance how that content is discovered, presented and monetized.”
He said so-called new media and terrestrial radio are very compatible.
“We’re building a digital publishing platform, so that we can be sure that our brands are able to be consumed by any new device, and any platform, on demand and in any way that our users and listeners and viewers want to do that.”
For listeners and viewers to do that, they’ve got to be able to find the content, which is why Cox plans to deploy the EveryZing technology across its 68 radio station Web site.
