The lure of inside-the-video search was enough to hook Intel Capital, Draper Fischer Jurvetson Frontier, and Labrador Ventures into offering $6 million in a first round of funding to Seattle-based Pluggd.
Announced Thursday, the round follows a $1.65 million angel round in December that also included Intel Capital.
The year-and-a-half-old startup offers publishers tools that use speech-to-text and semantic search principles that allow users to type a search term while they’re watching a video, and then jump around to spots in the video where a like-minded phrase is uttered.
“Consumers can jump to part of the video they really like instead of having to look at things they don’t like,” Pluggd CEO Alex Castro said.
Pluggd, which has been showing off its technology on pluggd.com, unveiled a corporate site Thursday designed to attract publishers and advertisers to become customers.
Pluggd is hoping that inside-the-stream search will let it stand out in a crowded field of video search engines.
Most widely used video search tools–Google’s, for example, or AOL’s Truveo–are still stuck with searching the metadata associated with the video as a whole without considering what’s inside the video. Others, such as Blinkx, use text inside the video as tools to help the user better find an entire video that matches the terms they’re searching, and to help advertisers target specific places in a video where their message might be most appropriately displayed.
But Pluggd is not alone in offering up tools for people to find the exact point in the video that includes what they’re looking for. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based EveryZing, for example, produces a transcript associated with pieces of audio and video that allows users to jump around to the point in the video where the exact same phrase is uttered.
Boston-based Gotuit offers a tool that allows people to jump around to specific places inside a video, but that’s based on a less technologically advanced system--inputting metadata from specific parts of the video. Gotuit’s customers include Sports Illustrated and, according to the company’s web site, Red Herring.
Scott Lenet of DFJ Frontier said that as the metrics advertisers look to move increasingly from page views to the amount of time users spend on the site, he’s confident that Pluggd’s system can help publishers keep users on their sites for longer periods of time.
"What we’ve found is that technology that lets people search in the stream translates into more time watching the video, because now you know that the content in the video is related to your interest,” said Mr. Lenet. “People abandon the video if they don’t get to the parts they want to see. If you think of minutes as inventory, content owners can create more inventory with this system.”