One of the big problems with video on the Web is that other than the title, description and some meta tags, it is mostly invisible to Google and other search engines. One way to make video more SEO-friendly is to add transcriptions, but that can get expensive. An angel-funded startup called SpeakerText is (re)launching today with a very clever way to automate the transcription process and attach the full transcript as part of the video player in a drop down window. You can see an example of how this works below. And if you publish a lot of videos and want to try it out yourself, we have 100 beta invites (use the code: techcrunch).

Once a video is transcribed, it appears in a collapsible window below each player. Not only is all the text visible to search engines, and thus should help drive more search traffic to individual videos, but the text is all time-stamped. So you can click on any sentence and it will jump to that point in the video. Anytime somebody cuts and pastes a portion of the transcript in a blog or other site, a link back to that point in the video is also included. The startup tried doing a Flash wrapper before for the YouTube player. It completely reworked its technology into what it is now calling the SpeakerBar that is more of a transcript plug-in that detects any video on your site that has a matching plug-in. SpeakerText works with video players from YouTube, Brightcove, and Blip.tv, and there is also a WordPress plug-in.



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