Metadata in Flash Video

Beet.tv has a post on the news that Adobe is going to be adding voice-to-text functionality inside of Flash video that will be added to the video as metadata. What basically happens is that any speech in the video will be converted into text which would then be accessible in a number of different ways. Beet.tv was the first to mention the news back in July and it sounds like it's getting closer.

This comes at a good time. With the improvements in Flash search this would expose all of that video data as text to search engines. It would make searching video easier as well as drilling down into specific parts of the video based on content.

I still hate that everything boils down to text and that video and audio haven't become first class data on the web but text is still the name of the game. The easier we make it to shoehorn rich media into the text world, the easier it will be to insert them into more core parts of the web. It still feels hacky to me, but hopefully it's a good first step.