4/8/08 - Featured Company: Pluggd
Web Site: www.pluggd.com
Headquarters: Seattle, Washington
Year Founded: 2006
Founders: Alex Castro, CEO; Jonathan Thompson, Chief Architect
Investors: Intel Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson
Employees: 13
Total Capital Raised: $6 million
Company News: www.plugged.com/news
*Updated: 4/8/08
By Alex Castro, Founder and CEO
At Pluggd, we are bringing a new slate of products to market this year that we hope will mark significant advances in the way consumers experience web video and in the way that advertisers can monetize that video.
For starters, we have invented technology that allows web users to “search inside” a web video (or audio) file, before consuming the entire file. This allows the consumer to find the section they want, then “surf” directly to that part of the video. In this way, we hope to make video browsing much more like web page browsing.
Our patent-pending “Heat Map” technology is an innovative user interface that guides users to the content topics they wish to see or hear in an audio or video file. The goal is to make multimedia search as easy and intuitive as general web search.
When a user clicks “play” on an audio or video file, Pluggd processes the file through our Content Publishing system, which essentially generates a transcript of the words and associated topics that are present in the file. When a user enters a keyword search term, the query flows through our Transcript and Concept databases, generating a color-coded heat-map. The heat-map shows relevancy of sections of the file to the search term. Red indicates a direct match, orange a near-match, and blue a non-match. Intuitively, a user can advance the “scrubber bar” to the part of the file that he or she wishes to see (or hear). The system works for files of any length, enabling a new kind of viewing experience that puts the navigation of the video or audio file directly into the hands of a user who can browse according to their interest in topics they choose.
Not so long ago, popular video was the exclusive province of movies and television. These programs were characterized by the following:
*High cost of production
*Established channels of distribution
*Monetization through direct purchase or attached advertising
Let’s take the popular situation comedy, “Everybody Loves Raymond,” as an example of the realities of video production by Old Media. Each episode cost over five million dollars to produce. The network, CBS, ordered 26 episodes for a standard season. The program ran for nine seasons. The high cost of production reflected the considerable talent of the writers, actors and unionized production crew of a hit show, which could only have been brought to life under a mature television production system.