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Searchable Audio/Video Technology
wyldchild37 writes: "Business 2.0 has an article on an interesting new technology - TV That Works Like the Web. A new startup wants to make all television content archived, indexed, and searchable."
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Dremedia isn't the only one working on this. despite the Business 2.0 article's nearly sole focus on that particular company. A few others in the field include, and of course is not limited to, MediaSite (which looks to have recently been acquired by the audio and video editing software company Sonic Foundry), Virage, Pictron and Vodium. Its worth checking out each of the sites respective products page to see how they each are approaching this this new field.
forma3
News broadcasts are keyword-indexed. Some indexing is based on closed-caption data. Other stuff is just listed by title and date.
Anyone can view the video, but you have to go to Chicago. It's fun; I've been there.
This stuff is being reported as a very novel stuff. But there has significant research being done in academia.
Stony Brook (SUNY) ECSL has developed a Videoserver prototype. The difference between this technology and that of ECSL's is that, ECSL videoserver uses closed captions available in the news clips. This way the burden of speech recongnition is taken off the archiving and indexing servers.
You can read all about it at this page
This was developed in 1999. This is a well documented project and publicly available. During its initial days it was made available at several download sites. This is still available (documentation + sources) from ecsl website. The only problem is that, this was developed on redhat 5.2 version and used many Beta Stage libraries of gtk(--) etc. Which are now obsolete. It will take a little bit of effort to get it working on latest platforms.
-- Srikant
To do that, the box could request a copy of the currently displayed frame from a server, every time you change the channel. This would require two-way communication (possible on a cable network), and might be a privacy concern (the server would know what channels you're watching - although I hear digital cable boxes already send that info), but would probably give you an image within 50 ms. Another way would be to constantly transmit low-quality/low-resolution images (probably 10-15 per second, compressed using a lossy codec). You'd at least have some picture as soon as you change the channel, and you'd have full quality video as soon as the next keyframe is received (within a second). According to an earlier Slashdot article, digital channels aren't using all their assigned bandwidth anyway.
Second part: I want a device that eliminates the stupid and annoying station logos. Contrary to popular belief, many people actually know what damn channel they are watching
I recently used a digital cable box at someone's house. When changing channels, it displayed the channel number, channel name, and (on some channels) the name of the current show. This makes the watermark pretty pointless. If a digital TV company was using one of the methods I mentioned above, they could transmit a watermark image as well. The box could provide an option allowing you to show the watermark always, never, or for the first few seconds after tuning in (after which point it would fade out).
Don't bother.
I'll just fast forward you to the last 2 sentences.
Now we simply need all the other pieces of the interactive TV puzzle to fall into place. Don't hold your breath.
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