Under New Name, EveryZing Ramps up Video Automation

Say goodbye to EveryZing and hello to Ramp, because this morning at the Streaming Media West conference in San Jose, California, the company announced a new name, new product, and new focus.

As EveryZing, the Boston-based company made a name for itself by helping companies index their videos and then make them searchable, resulting in more clicks for existing content. As Ramp, the company will go farther in letting companies do more with the video they're already creating.

The company's centerpiece is the new Ramp platform, and it offers a highly automated system for optimizing video for online use. The target client is a major media house with lots of video it wants to use on the web, but not enough staff to process and prepare it all. The Ramp platform is built into four modules—Workflow, Discover, Engage, and Monetize—that process video with no human interaction, resulting in more hits and more ads being served.

• Workflow: The Ramp platform first uses the company's existing natural language processing engine to create a transcript of a video and then select important words and phrases for tagging. This lets viewers find the videos they're looking for with text-based searching.

• Discover: Ramp goes even further with the text transcript with the Discover module, organizing videos by topic so that search engines can more easily find them. This module will also dynamically syndicate videos to appropriate sites based on identified topics.

• Engage: The Engagement module lets viewers find exactly the content they're interested in, so they'll stick around longer. Video, photo, and text search results are grouped together by topic, so that site visitors see all the resources relating the subject they search. Results are blended in a way that seems natural, and viewers have the ability to jump to a certain timestamp in a video so they can see just the content that interests them. This module also makes playlists of related videos.

• Monetize: The fourth of the Ramp modules is all about that magic word, monetization. Once you've got your video content tagged and organized in a way that brings in viewers and keeps them happy, how do you make money off it? This step automatically matches in-stream advertising to the videos' topics. It keeps your advertisers happy by putting their spots on relevant videos, and helps click-through rates by delivering ads for related products.

The Ramp platform is a hosted software-as-a-service solution that works through a browser interface. The management console lets sites share their videos with other properties. For example, Ramp clients Fox News and Fox Sports can show relevant videos that each other have created. Managers can even choose to pull in YouTube videos, as Petside.com, a pet site owned by NBC, does.

Licensing costs for Ramp are either on a monthly or yearly cycle, with the actual fee calculated by the amount of content processed and the number of actions defined. Startup fees are typically in the low tens of thousands, with monthly fees usually between $5,000 and $15,000.