Durham-based DigitalSmiths is projecting its newest video search technology, which will be on display next month at the giant Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, will eventually outsell its flagship product.
CEO Ben Weinberger said the company, which has 60 employees and has raised about $30 million in venture capital to date, has been quietly working for 18 months with a number of cable, satellite and digital video providers - and even TV and Blu-ray player manufacturers - that have been diligently testing the company's new Seamless Discovery video-search-and-recommendation technology.
The sales cycle is long, but in the last 30 to 60 days, "we have won deals that we're not able to announce yet" at the insistence of customers, Weinberger said. "Things are heating up very fast." Some of those deals will be unveiled at CES.
Seamless Discovery is a sophisticated tool that not only makes video recommendations to viewers based on their past viewing habits a la Netflix, but also shows the viewer where that video content can be found - whether it's available "on demand" or on a basic cable channel.
It also works on multiple devices - televisions, PCs, tablet devices and smartphones.
The technology also can blend viewing data from different household members to come up with a recommendation that the whole family can enjoy.
Seamless Discovery is being sold as back-end technology that customers - cable, satellite and Internet video providers and electronics manufacturers - can integrate into the user interfaces that their customers use. "That's what these companies really want," Weinberger said. "They want to maintain their brand identity."
Colin Dixon, senior partner at The Diffusion Group, a market research and strategy firm, said DigitalSmiths has a lot of competition but its technology stacks up well.
Cable and satellite TV companies are working hard to sell pay-per-view movies without much success "because their interfaces are really, really bad," said Dixon. Building a user-friendly interface based on Seamless Discovery, the thinking goes, could help them boost their pay-per-view revenue.
Privately-held DigitalSmiths doesn't disclose its revenue, but Weinberger said it's on course to slightly more than double this year and should grow even faster next year. Sales of Seamless Discovery, he added, are driving that growth.
The 13-year-old company's flagship VideoSense technology enables searching video by actor, line of dialogue, location, genre or product. Its customers include Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, The CW Network, Turner Sports and the gossip website TMZ.
