The process of affordably generating large quantities of high-quality metadata (the information that describes content itself) makes a big leap forward today with EveryZing's announcement of its new "MediaCloud" service.

EveryZing is one of my favorite technology companies focused on video because its products leverage search behavior to drive increased and more specific video views. Regardless of the category (news, sports, entertainment, business) one of the key ways to incent more online video consumption is by returning more accurate results to users when they're seeking something specific. It's not just the improved user experience that counts; it's also that with rich metadata, accompanying ad avails are more targetable, therefore resulting in higher CPMs and/or pay-per-action ads.

Last Friday, EveryZing's CEO Tom Wilde walked me through MediaCloud and how it fits into the company's portfolio. With MediaCloud, which is offered on a SaaS (software-as-a-service) basis, customers' video is ingested either through live, FTP or MRSS feeds and is then processed through several steps of EveryZing's proprietary technology to generate the metadata. These steps (depicted at right) include conversion of speech-to-text, natural language processing to extract things like people, places and things, and finally generating thumbnails, geocodes and soon, sentiment. The result is an XML file that publishers and others then incorporate into their content work flow. The process occurs at a 1:1 level with the video itself and costs $.50 per minute of content. All of this happens in the cloud, which Tom believes is a first.

MediaCloud essentially takes what's behind EveryZing's ezSearch and ezSEO products and offers it to customers directly. According to Tom, customers' appreciation for the value of metadata has grown considerably in the last couple of years, therefore making a service like MediaCloud both timely and appealing. Today MediaCloud is geared for more sophisticated publishers who are ready to "graduate" to managing the metadata creation process themselves, but my sense is that eventually this will become a fairly standard part of the work flow for all reasonably-sized video publishers.

Net, net, MediaCloud is another important advancement in helping publishers mesh video into their users' behavioral patterns, helping monetize it at a potentially far higher level. No doubt we'll see more SaaS-type video metadata services in the future, but for now MediaCloud is a leader.