EveryZing, a spin-off of BBN Technologies, the outfit that dreamt up ARPANET and the e-mail @ sign, has launched MediaCloud, the first-ever cloud-based solution for online video and media companies.

The widgetry automatically generates and manages all kinds of metadata, the so-called currency of multimedia content, the speech transcripts, time-stamped tags, categories/topics, named entities, geo-location and tagged thumbnails that make the stuff findable on the web.

It promises to help media owners boost revenue by increasing consumption and lowering costs.

EveryZing means media folk to post live or archived feeds of video, audio, images and text content to its cloud-based service and get back the metadata they need in near real-time

The company says that before EveryZing entered the picture publishing and discovering multimedia content was restricted to indexing just titles and tags, making it a hit-or-miss proposition since most search engines can only match text tags.

MediaCloud is a SaaS service and requires no software to install, maintain or buy and customers only pay for the processing they need. To ensure virtually unlimited scalability, the company will use Amazon’s EC2 cloud for “burst capacity.”

Its own server and storage infrastructure is currently capable of handling 10,000 hours of content a day, according to CEO Tom Wilde.

Pricing works out to about 50 cents a minute with close to real-time turnaround versus what would otherwise be three bucks and a couple of days.

The scheme has been in beta for the last three months and EveryZing says it’s signed Dow Jones Factiva, Reuters, MetroMonitor and Newstex as customers.

Applications include contextual ad targeting, universal search & publishing, video archives, media monitoring, online closed captioning and voicemail-to-text.

MediaCloud leverages the venture-backed Massachusetts company’s speech-to-text technology and natural language processing skills. There’s enhanced language support for the Queen’s English and Spanish.