"To further promote the user-generated contents, Yahoo Korea plans to offer a new tool to handily edit them soon."
01-03-2006
Video Search New Battlefield on Net
Small Internet Companies Get Head Start, Forcing Major Portals to Follow Suit
By Kim Tae-gyu
Staff Reporter
South Korean portal sites are competing to win out at a new battlefield of video search services, expected to become a buzzword this year.
Video search refers to an application allowing people to look for video clips on the Internet in much the same way they look for Web pages or text.
Small portals moved nimbly as Empas launched a search engine for multimedia contents last August and Yahoo Korea embarked on similar services two months later.
As the minnow players set the tone, market leaders followed suit: the nation's No. 1 portal Naver of NHN and Daum Communications that runs the runner-up site started beta services for video search last month.
Daum plans to roll out full-fledged service this month and Naver also looks to jump onto the multimedia-search bandwagon during the first quarter.
``The basis for contents on the Internet is shifting from text to video and Korean portals are adapting themselves to the change well,'' said Wayne Lee, an analyst at Woori Securities.
``What is out there today is just the tip of the iceberg as more and more digital video clips are likely to make their way on to the Internet, boosting the archives of portals,'' Lee predicted.
Empas and Yahoo have indexed approximately 500,000 video files each, while latecomer Naver has roughly 600,000. Daum aims to double its 300,000 files in a month.
``As the costs of producing video contents have been steadily decreasing over the past several years in Korea, the trend of the multimedia search will be sure to catch on,'' he added.
Almost all the latest cell phones here have the capability to record several hours video content and the easier-to-use new video editing software prods them to create contents themselves.
Lee said the ubiquitous availability of the high-speed Internet in Korea is another strong factor for video search services here, which eat up broad bandwidth.
Some 12 million of the country's total 15.5 million households are hooked up to the always-on Internet, the highest ratio in the world.
By contrast, it is difficult to facilitate multimedia search in other countries, where slow dial-up modems are still the main way to connect to the Internet.
Two Pillars for Video Search
Korean portal sites are especially at loggerheads in two segments vying for a share in the multimedia search services.
One is the user created content (UCC) enabled by aforementioned broadband Internet and personal video recorders. The other segment includes contents like sports games and soap operas aired by TV stations.
The former is forming an online community sharing the self-made video files between Internet users while the latter brings TV to the Internet, the long-promised convergence of television and computers.
``The two sorts of contents are equally important. So we channel efforts and funds into both segments to attract Korea's early adopters, especially young users,'' Yahoo Korea spokesman Brian Kim said.
Indeed, Yahoo Korea is providing video files of sports games like baseball and plans to include World Cup game clips to its data base later this year in time with the start of the football gala.
In addition, the company attracts about 5,000 UCCs every month. To further promote the user-generated contents, Yahoo Korea plans to offer a new tool to handily edit them soon.
Daum spokeswoman Jody Chung concurs by saying, ``Basically, we also seek similar strategy with Yahoo Korea. We will tap both sectors of famous contents and user-made ones.''
Daum forged a business alliance with SBS last year, one of the nation's terrestrial broadcasters, to add the network's news clips to its video search database.
In time with the full-fledged launch of its service, Daum wants to show the video files in its cafe to those who want to search for video clips.
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