Wildly Appropriate

MSNBC.com Video Findability Win

Today’s Wall Street Journal reports on a new feature on MSNBC.com’s video player which makes the full text transcripts of news video on the site searchable, and which allows users to retrieve footage relevant to their search queries with the corresponding video pre-cued to the bit(s) where the search terms appear in the timeline of the clip. WSJ describes the new features, which have yet to roll out to my neck of the woods, as “Akin to using the ‘find’ function on a text document.” The new featureset also allows users to set their own “in” and “out” markers and embed or email custom-configured clips.

Big findability win for site users … and gosh, with these mappings between words and video frames in their databases, it should be possible if not easy for MSNBC.com’s pre-roll ads to be contextualized against the transcript of the footage being viewed. More relevant ads is also good for users some would argue, and this bountiful stream of metadata might also allow advertisers to prevent unwanted adjacencies among their ads and publishers’ content. For example, “I’d like to buy 10,000 prerolls during the next month, but don’t show my ads before any content which contains the following words in its transcript…”

Update – Feature is now live!
Wow, check it out: I found a baldfaced lie in GWB’s first inaugural speech and can embed and share exactly the bits I find to be disgusting!

16. January 2009 by dan
Categories: Information Architecture Design, Information Architecture Strategy, User Experience Design | Tags: findability, metadata, news, video | Leave a comment