A news archive might hold thousands of hours of tape with only a few written notes to find anything in it. Virage, based in San Mateo, built software that watched and listened to video. It logged the speech and the scenes, and it made footage searchable like text. Video was spreading online, and it was nearly impossible to search. Virage went public in June 2000, as media companies began moving their archives to the web.

Speech, Faces and Scenes

Virage bet that video would become as searchable as documents. Its software combined speech recognition, face recognition and scene detection to build an index of each clip. Broadcasters, government agencies and corporations used it to find footage quickly. It also offered hosted services that let websites publish and search video clips. The market for such tools grew more slowly than the company hoped.

Sold to Autonomy

Virage priced its IPO at $11 a share in June 2000 and listed on Nasdaq. Like many young software companies, it struggled as tech spending fell after 2001. In 2003 Autonomy, the British search software company, bought Virage and added its video tools to its own products. Later video search services built on the same ideas at a much larger scale.

Cover: A Turn in the Road, Alfred Sisley. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a bend in the road (virage).