Critical Mention—Bringing TV to the Web

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.