Fairfield, Conn., Sept. 14, 2005 - AOL will be the first major Web portal or search engine to provide its users with Podscope's podcast search capability, according to a new agreement between AOL and TVEyes, Inc. The new capability will be based on an integration of the TVEyes Podscope search engine with AOL® Search. Podscope, which creates a Spoken Word Index™ for every word in audio and video files, makes the files searchable in the same manner as text pages on the Web.
Available this fall, AOL's podcast search function will offer immediate access to every known podcaster's most current files and thousands of archived files, a vast library being added to each day, as well as AOL's podcast offerings and programming. The new search functions will be accessible through the AOL.com® portal (http://www.aol.com) and AOL Search (http://www.aolsearch.com). In addition to plans for enhanced podcast search, AOL.com has introduced an array of new features and programming (http://www.aol.com/podcasting), including a Podcasting 101 guide, designed to make it easy for listeners to discover, experience and download some of the web's most popular podcasts.
"AOL visitors will be able to search for content within podcast files just like they do for text within Web pages," said David J. Ives, president and chief executive officer of TVEyes, Inc., whose technology and company are behind Podscope. "Because of AOL's commitment to podcasting, consumer-created and broadcast media distributed as podcasts will gain truly global distribution."
"We're excited to work with Podscope to offer the unique capability to search within podcasts through our AOL.com Web portal and AOL Search," said Alex Blum, vice president, audience product management, for America Online. "This innovative search capability will enable podcast enthusiasts to sample relevant audio snippets using Spoken Word Indexing™ prior to subscribing to the podcast."
"As TV and radio migrate to the on-demand dynamic of podcasts on the Internet, new search tools are needed to make what will ultimately be billions of spoken words in millions of files accessible in a meaningful way," said Allen Weiner, research vice president at Gartner. "Indexing the spoken word has a profound impact on a consumer's ability to find what they want and get the most out of audio and video search."
Podscope (http://www.podscope.com), is the first and only search engine that creates a Spoken Word Index™ for the entire content of podcasts - enabling the user to find the exact content that interests them, a technology which is also applicable to video blogs and personal videos. Podcasts are essentially downloadable radio programs that can be played on a digital media music player or PC. Podscope crawls the web looking for podcasts and creates an index against every word, thereby making the contents searchable. The user can search on a term, generate a list of results ranked by a variety of methods to find the most relevant podcast and click to play or click to download. Podscope is a service of TVEyes Inc., headquartered in Fairfield, CT, which has been indexing television and radio broadcasts since 1999. It is the first company to deliver real-time TV and radio search across multiple languages on an international platform. More information on TVEyes can be found at http://www.tveyes.com or http://www.podscope.com.
