Hello,
I thought I might take the time to share this with you, since I did tons of research to figure this out. I kept reading over and over how Google uses video sitemaps to index video content, but since we are using the Wowza Media Server to stream the videos via RTMP, there was no actual file you could list in Google when using the content_loc tag (listed below):
<video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/video123.flv</video:content_loc>
After talking to Charlie at Wowza and also Ethan Longtail (Jeroen, creator of the JWPlayer) I tried a few different methods to tell Google to not only index the pages, but also list the videos on the page as well.
I discovered that by using Facebook Open Graph tags for this, you could get google to see your RTMP streams and put a thumbnail of your video in their index. You can check out the following link:
Here are the actual tags I used to make this work:
<meta property="og:type" content="movie" />
<meta property="og:video:height" content="240" />
<meta property="og:video:width" content="424" />
<meta property="og:video:type" content="application/x-shockwave-flash" />
<meta property="og:title" content="Hair Transplants" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Visit this page at http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sarasota-cosmetic-surgery.com%2Fhair-transplants.php<br />Hair transplants at Leonard A. Rubinstein, MD, PA Sarasota cosmetic surgery video" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.ampstreaming.com/view/rubinstein/video/hair-transplants-preview.jpg" />
<meta property="og:video" content="http://www.sarasota-cosmetic-surgery.com/jwplayer/player-licensed.swf?&streamer=rtmp%3A%2F%2F74.208.104.107%2Frubinstein&file=hair-transplants.flv&autostart=false" />
As you can see, I use a urlencoded string for the og:video tag, which I do automatically by using the handy urlencode() function in PHP.
This worked for me, so I hope it works for someone else, too!
Rick
I’m sure others will appreciate your research.