ROO Group has decided to integrate Viewdle facial recognition search technologies into the ROO media player environment. With its agreement, ROO will offer the Viewdle product as a white-label solution to its global network of corporate customers as a value-added service.

 

The agreement provides ROO with exclusive use of the technology in respect of its direct competitors in the business-to-business IPTV platform marketplace. Viewdle will integrate its video search capability into the ROO player to offer a seamless user experience as either a stand-alone product or integrated with a broader ROO solution.

 

"To understand the magnitude of this type of technology, I think the reference point is the late '90s emergence of reliable data search as the primary traffic driver on the Internet," said Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, chairman and chief executive officer of ROO. "The reliability and usability of Viewdle's video search capabilities have the capacity to do for dynamic video content what Google's (News - Alert) algorithms did for static data search."

 

Gavin Campion, president of ROO believes that this functionality -- when matched with speech-to-text and standard meta-tagging -- has the potential to be a major revenue driver for advertisers looking to leverage content and increase engagement across the hundreds of websites that utilize the ROO player.

 

"This partnership makes eminent sense: the ROO and Viewdle suite of products complement each other perfectly and working with ROO will enable us to reach large video content owners around the world who are looking for additional ways to catalogue and monetize their content," said Laurent Gil, president of Viewdle.

 

Both ROO and Viewdle have entered the integration phase with live customer deployment planned for 3Q 2008.