Most radio stations these days have websites where you can listen to streaming versions of their broadcasts. But few have taken the added step of making individual shows available online—in part because there’s little financial incentive, unless they can sell online ads against that content. That’s where EveryZing of Cambridge, MA, thinks it can help—and the company said today that Cox Radio (NYSE: [[ticker:CXR]]) will use its software to make it easier for consumers (and search engines and advertisers) to find specific radio clips on the websites of all 68 of its FM and AM radio stations nationwide.
We profiled EveryZing, a BBN Technologies spinoff that uses speech-to-text algorithms to create transcripts of Web video and audio content that can then be indexed by search engines, last July and again in February. Up to now, EveryZing has mainly been working to help big media portals like Boston.com monetize their video content. But it has also had a long-running deal with Entercom Boston’s WEEI Sports Radio Network, where, according to EveryZing CEO Tom Wilde, the number of unique users listening to the station’s online clips has increased 16-fold over the last 18 months.
“The paradigm with radio on the Internet to date has been, bring it up in a streaming media player, minimize it, and listen,” says Wilde. “That’s not very interesting. It’s just another pipe. We’re trying to bring a ‘lean forward’ metaphor to the consumption of radio.” Once a company has installed EveryZing’s system, Wilde explains, customers can discover specific clips through web searches and jump precisely to the point of interest within those clips. “That’s what the Web is for and that’s what users want,” says Wilde.
The Cox deal is the biggest deployment to date for EveryZing’s software. “By partnering with EveryZing, we are able to leverage the unique content assets from our terrestrial broadcasts on the web and significantly enhance how that content is discovered, presented, and monetized,” said Gregg Lindahl, vice president of interactive technologies for Cox Radio, in EveryZing’s announcement of the agreement. Cox is in the process of acquiring an additional 18 stations that will give it a presence in 19 radio markets nationwide, including Atlanta, Houston, Miami, Orlando, San Antonio, and Tampa.
Wilde says EveryZing is on a path to keep growing quickly. “As a company we’re having the right conversations and ultimately winning the right deals with established media companies, who are in great need of solutions to transition their businesses successfully into the Internet age,” says Wilde.
But only recently, says Wilde, has the company developed its software to the point where it can be scaled up to work across companies as big as Cox. “If they had come to us six months ago to do a 68-station rollout, it would have crushed us. But we’ve built out the platform with this use case in mind—conglomerates with dozens of units that need to be serviced.” Along with the Cox deal, EveryZing today introduced a new management interface called RAMP—for “Reach, Access, Monetization, and Protection”—that lets clients control how content is presented to search engines and consumers and how advertising should appear alongside that content.
