Trint, the brainchild of Emmy-winning reporter and former foreign correspondent Jeff Kofman, launched a video player on Thursday that allows engines such as Google and Bing to index the audio to text content in search results.

“You have a huge amount of content that is inaccessible,” Kofman said. “It’s just physically not possible or too expensive to make it all searchable.”

Trint’s technology — which Kofman describes as a new way to navigate audio and video — converts the spoken words into searchable, editable and interactive transcripts. It combines a text editor with an audio video player to generate a transcript in milliseconds.

The tool aims to support anyone in media production including journalists, academic researchers or investigators, but it also can help make content easier to find in how-to or instructional videos that marketers may upload to their websites or YouTube.

Advertisers will spend 25% more on digital video content in 2019 — an average of $18 million, according to estimates in a report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

“It’s often impressive media content, but you need to go to the website to find it,” Kofman said. “They’re missing a huge opportunity to capture through a simple search.”

The key is making images searchable and discoverable, he said, but it also makes the content more accessible to those with impaired vision.

The Trint Player was built with a grant from the Google Digital News Innovation Fund, a European program to help journalism thrive in Europe.

Trint’s product roadmap also includes a live transcription service for enterprise customers called Trint Live Logging.  An editor in Denver listening to the live transcription, for example, could post it on social media as the live conversation occurs to meet tight deadlines.

Kofman said the Live Blogging feature is getting a lot of interest from news organizations, with the approaching 2020 U.S. election.

Trint began by supporting news organizations such as The Washington Post and Associated Press, but Nike also uses the technology for media production. 

Finding the moment in interviews and speeches is the biggest impediment to content production, he said.