San Mateo, California-based Virage Inc’s Video Cataloguer software has the largest share of the US video logging market, claims a new Frost & Sullivan report on the US digital media management market. Video logging is a new digital media management technology that transforms video into a data type which can be indexed, retrieved and distributed over the web or on client-server enterprise networks. Frost & Sullivan predicts that the market for high-end video logging applications will grow very rapidly over the next seven years. Due partly to an aggressive market entry in the last quarter of 1997 and also to its advanced technology, the Virage Video Cataloguer has achieved a 49.5% share of the US market, the report says. Using media analysis algorithms which automatically watch, listen to and read a video stream, the Video Cataloguer extracts metadata – keyframes, time codes, textual information and an audio profile – from the video in real time. The information becomes the basis of an index which provides immediate non-linear access to any segment of the video. In parallel to the indexing process, the system can also control the encoding of a streamable version of the original content. Synchronized encoding and indexing allows users to navigate through the video by using the index to go directly to a point of interest, rather than streaming it from start to finish. This approach is claimed to provide video previewing which is faster than real time, conserving network bandwidth and cutting costs associated with editing and re-purposing video. Virage was founded in 1993 and has technology partnerships with digital media specialists such as Avid Technology, Informix, RealNetworks and Sun Microsystems. It has also developed an image recognition system called the Visual Information Retrieval Engine.
