Full Transcript:

Cameron Clarke: My name is Cameron Clarke, I am the CEO and founder of Vodium.

Benjamin Higginbotham: All right, what is Vodium?

Cameron Clarke: Vodium is an online communications company. We use streaming video to be able to deliver a variety of types of communications for our clients. So, that would be CEO speeches, marketing presentations, continue legal education, to continue medical education, conferences, speeches, hearings that kind of things.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Is this a live event or is this an on-demand event?

Cameron Clarke: 20% of our business is live, 80% is on-demand. We really focus on the on-demand, because we believe that the audience is large on the on-demand and really only two reasons to do a live presentation. One is if you want interactivity and secondly if it is time sensitive information, other than that on-demand is far more valuable.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Will you do both, will you do live event then make it available on-demand after the fact as well?

Cameron Clarke: We do. So, most live events actually do end up being on-demand, only a fraction of a live events are only strictly live.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, how would you say this is different than a broadcast.com, who do a live event to the CEO speeches and what not then?

Cameron Clarke: The old broadcast.com?

Benjamin Higginbotham: The old broadcast.com.

Cameron Clarke: So, in fact it is the next generation, I would say next second or third generation from the original broadcast.com. In fact we grew out of that same model, but we take it to the next level. So, we have video search capabilities, we have synchronized transcripts, we allow the user to search through the entire presentation to find what they want, we have book-marking capabilities. It is really a much more powerful application, than just sitting there and watching a linear experience. For us, it is not about linear experience, it is about turning video into knowledge, so we allow the user to define their own experience with this knowledge and be able to develop a non-linear experience with that content.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That’s an interesting point, because there are a lot of problems right now, let’s say we have got a one hour speech, but you really only wanted the from 45 minutes on or from that topic on, are you able to then search for that not only a specific video, but for a point in time in that video? And start that video from that point forward?

Cameron Clarke: Absolutely and that’s the empowering part of our platform. I liken it to the fact that could you manage what the Internet would be like, if you had to read an entire website every time you went to the website in order to find what you wanted. I mean that’s pretty much what happens when there with a lot of the non-linear experience to video, you got to shuffle through to find things and it is impossible find the note that is important to you. So, the reality is once you index it, once you make it searchable people can find that information vary rapidly get in, collaborate maybe with that information, pass it on to others and then get out. It becomes part of their day-to-day work product as supposed to a separate experience.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, the video in and of itself doesn’t actually contain the data for searching, because if I said the word “pancake” it doesn’t know that I said pancake, how do you get that data in there? Where is that meta-data associated with it?

Cameron Clarke: Right, so we actually use human transcribers. We shoot for 100% accuracy in the transcripts and in fact there was an effort early on by number of companies that are no longer around, where they tried to use voice recognition. The reality is that voice recognition only gets you 70% to 85% accuracy, but the reality is if you miss that one word, that you are looking for then entire presentation has no value. So, the good things is, that it is very inexpensive to have captioners transcribe the video and so we use human beings and then we have an automated technology which does synchronization for us and we can do this very rapidly. We can transcribe things overnight or the same day and have them published same day or overnight if necessary.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Is there any type of synchronization of additional media at all or it is strictly the video?

Cameron Clarke: There is, so there are PowerPoint slides, graphics, photographs, documents, we allow our customers to hyperlink in articles, news and press releases and anything that can be rendered on the Internet, can be rendered in our platform. Flash animations, simulations, games that is what rich media is really all about. So, we try to enrich the user experience by delivering content that is in itself rich and synchronizing it in very powerful way.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Can you do the synchronization live as well or is that specific to on-demand?

Cameron Clarke: We can. So, as one is giving a presentation we could actually have a flash animation or flash simulation or game popup in our live platform absolutely. We even have allowed folks to show videos in a different window, streaming simultaneously with live video.

Benjamin Higginbotham: That’s got to take a little bit of bandwidth to make that happen?

Cameron Clarke: It does.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, are you pretty bandwidth intensive then? I mean you are at the Killer App Expo, so I assume that you have little bit of bandwidth you have to work with?

Cameron Clarke: We can be, but the reality is that we are using a new flash base platform, they we're pretty excited about and in fact we have implemented on top of flash, a very powerful technology that allows one to minimize the amount of bandwidth that is required for multiple sets of content. So, for example, one of the things that we have done is we have synchronized streaming video, this isn’t live this is our archive basis, archive streaming video with screen captures, so that 640x480 screen captures demos and what’s going on on the screen with a live streaming video all coming in at the entire technology ending under 220k required bandwidth. So, it is pretty powerful.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Now, because you are flash based, does that mean you're platform and browser agnostic at that point? Can you go PC, Mac, Linux you don’t care? Firefox?

Cameron Clarke: We are and that is, I got to tell you, that’s been a huge, that been a very exciting thing for our company. We used to have all kinds of platforms, and testers and things like that, that we required to test on and now we hardly test on any other platform, it’s really a developers dream.