Why The World Wants To Make Video Searchable

Video — YouTube and other video sites — is the top area where marketers plan on increasing their social media efforts, finds Social Media Examiner in an April 2012 report. The rapid growth in the number of phones that can record video means lots of people have hand-held video recording devices with them all the time. High speed Internet access means getting video online is easier than ever. Yet making video content easy to discover and search remains hard.

That’s because while voice to text software is great for simple dictation and commands (like Apple’s Siri), it’s still poor when it comes to general transcription. This year, Speechpad has seen a dramatic increase in the amount of video content our customers want transcribed. Here’s why:

1. Search engines can find your video content. More than just keywords or titles, complete transcriptions of videos provide content for search engines to index. More content, more visits to your web site, more users or customers for your product.

2. Your videos become relevant. Rather than having to watch an entire video, your users or customers can easily go to the portion of video they find relevant. If you post an interview, for example, that covers a lot of different topics, a user interested in one topic can go straight to the segment they care about.

3. You unlock the value of your video. Video content is one of the easiest forms of content to produce today. iPhones and Android devices make excellent recording devices, which means creating interviews, product overviews, whiteboard sessions, and other video content is easy. High-speed Internet access means it’s no longer hard to get that video online. Combine these two trends: huge growth in the number of hand-held video recording devices and ease of getting video online, and you have an incredible valuable way to create content. The challenge is unlocking the value of that content.

Transcribing video into text makes video content searchable, accessible, and relevant.