Critical Mention—Bringing TV to the Web [The Next Net]

In the last issue of B2.0, I wrote about a startup called Critical Mention that is doing some amazing things with video search (through CriticalTV) and syndicating clips (through ClipSyndicate) of local TV news on the Web.  Excerpt:

By indexing the
closed captions for all the video stored on CriticalTV, the service
creates searchable transcripts on the fly.

And the service is still getting smarter.  Using
speech-to-text software recently licensed from IBM Research, CriticalTV
will soon monitor video that isn’t closed-captioned and also search
Arabic-language TV and translate it into English. Customers ranging
from corporate PR officers to FBI analysts to oil executives will
continue to be alerted via e-mail (with a link to the video clip)
minutes after a company, product, or terrorist name is mentioned on TV
here or abroad.

But while CriticalTV pays the bills, [CEO Sean] Morgan’s ambitions go beyond mere monitoring. In an era when TV stations are losing their audience to channel
surfing, commercial skipping, and the Web, the ClipSyndicate site
promises to find a better audience for news broadcasts. Morgan has
already struck deals with more than 65 affiliates and is in discussions
with all the major station groups to host clips from their local news
and other shows.

Once
the video is on ClipSyndicate, publishers can search for segments,
splice them, and stream them through their own sites. In effect, Morgan
is turning one-time TV broadcasts into media chunks that can be remixed
for more exacting online audiences.

ClipSyndicate will insert
15-second ads in front of each video stream and split revenue 50/30/20
with the affiliate and the web site, a model similar to NBC’s new
business, the National Broadband Co.