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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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now I can get an error 404 on my TV.
Just what I wanted.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Didn't we hear about interactive TV before? Isn't that garbage over? Granted, TiVo is fairly popular, and it deserves it, but everyone I know wants to sit in front of their TV and be a vegetable. That's what it's good at, and that's what people use it for. This one'll sink because people would rather be lazy.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Since the advent of the Web, I find myself wishing more and more physical media was indexed and searchable.
Ever read "Fellowship of the Ring" and wish you could search the book you're holding? Or watched a bunch of shows end wish you could grep for something you remembered hearing?
As the TV/Computer/Film merge and become more dense we need better ways to pick out pertinent information 'nuggets'. Otherwise, it is just information overload.
Great. Now we can type stuff into the TV, get 500,000 irrelevant results, get distracted by an I Love Lucy rerun, and wake up 4 hours later trying to remember what we were looking for. Thanks again technology.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Ok, I've got well over three hundred channels, a friend of mine has over eight hundred, all of these are constantly putting out new content simultaneously. I cannot begin to imagine the resources that it would take to record this all and then storing it, say digitally, would be a storing all the data that _three_ atom smashers pump out (a shitload of information, and an exageration on my part). There's also the issue of intellectual property, they're gonna have to get more licenses than I want to even begin counting. This seems like an incredibly naieve (sp?) dream. PS first _real_ post. I had to say it I'm sorry.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
A new startup wants to make all television content archived, indexed, and searchable.
Won't happen. This could be the cynical conspiracy theorist in me, but do you really think the *media* powers that be will allow even more technology that enables the bypassing of their lifeblood - commercials? Technology that gives consumers MORE control? Media giants have spent the last 2 dozen years bringing the control of what and when you watch to a fine art. Not to mention all the possible copyright and trademark debacles waiting to happen with all lawyers freed up from the death of napster, just waiting for someone to start to bring episode trading to the public's attention.
My Feature Request for TV
This is two-fold. First off, I want Satelite or digital cable that changes channels as fast as conventional cable (meaning *instantly*).
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. Take the TNG episodes running on TNN....how many people need to be reminded that they are watching Star Trek, WHILE they are WATCHING it?
.sig wanted: Must be concise, funny, and display my cleverness.
I wonder who gets first dibs on trying to slap on a copyright infringement suit of some sort on this idea? I know it isn't really the same as anything, but I'm sure that some company can claim a copyright on it somehow.
I also wonder how long it takes before someone figures out how to set up a computer based version of the TV so you can stream things to your comp. That might be a good project to start on.
My other sig is an import.
If it were implemented, how useful would the tools provided be? This raises the same questions as a Google or an IMDB:
1) Will the database be open to _all_ content providers, or just big-media?
2) Will search results be fairly reported, or will they be skewed by paid placement?
I dug around Dremedia.com looking for answers, but couldn't find anything. Has anyone read anything relevant to this?
-Tom
Serachable TV would be great!
IBM used to have a technology that would allow you to search graphics, call the Ultimedia extentions to DB2. This would allow you to look for, say a red ball beside a tree...and it would return all the images that have a red ball beside a tree...phenomenal tech, but I don't think it was much used. Maybe ths is an extension to that tech, but idexes all the keyframes of show, then putting it into a huge database...
I would be nice to be able to say "find all Star Trek episodes that show pictures of older ships named enterprise"...
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
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.
They had Clinton's "Monica" testimony indexed so you can search for words (think "cigar") and get to the portion of the video that mentions the words.
Since most television is closed-captions these days, it's not hard to get searchable text that corresponds to video, once the video is put on some random-access storage medium.
I really don't think there are any new breakthroughs here; it's just that storage got dirt cheap, video codecs got faster, making it more practical.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://images.google.com/ -- check it out. I have NO idea how it works, all I know is that it does.
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
You can't pan for gold using your bare hands!
I can still remember really cool stories on the news from when I was a little kid, I'd like to look some of that stuff up. Survivor and Friends aren't the only thing on television. Believe it or not theres some really good stuff on something. A database that complete would be a great resource. You want to know about the mating habits of the Great Panda? I bet Discovery or some other network has done a story on that. The list of worthless TV that you've got is pretty impressive, not that I've seen any of it. If this stuff bores you than you shouldn't watch it. This would be a great tool for research and recreation, too bad it isn't at all feasible.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
I don't see this being a big hit with home users: the whole point about TV is to be able to lean back and enjoy the show without fiddling around. Finding and arranging video clips is a lot of effort. People who want to jump around and interact are better served with a combination of text, images, and links to video clips, like what you find on today's news sites.
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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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
It's a bit disconcerting to watch one episode of a program where the two main characters are sleeping together, and then watch another the next week where they are complete strangers that don't meet until the end of the episode.
If anyone can fold a canadian dollar into a mapleleaf, it would be amazing, since the canadian dollar is a coin!
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Isn't this what the modern P2P networks are? Already on FastTrack Morpheus/KaZaA and Gnutella you can get several of the top 10 movies in DivX format, plus a slew of shows like Star Trek, Sceinfield, even Survivor reruns. I see it as network bandwidth to users increases and processors are able to zip through DivX encoding, this will be the one online, searchable audio (audio is already there) and video technology.
Don't bother with creating a new network, it's already there and is community supported -- both in infrastructure and in media.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
I would really like to see a Teletext-like system deployed in the USA and in NTSC television sets.
My fiancee' has no internet connectivity due to poor quality telephone lines and ISPs in her country.. but she has Teletext and for many things, it is enough.
Unimaginable? Not necessarily. Permanently storing all TV produced would be difficult right now, but it wouldn't be impossible to store the last year's programming using today's technology. Assume that you capture the video at 5Mbps MPEG-II:
Some quick calculations, that's 54 GB of data per day per channel. Sounds like a lot, but you have to realize that such an application can be massively distributed. A single machine with 10 (70-100GB) drives could hold a couple of weeks worth of a single channel.
Multiply that by the actual number of broadcast channels out there generating "new" content (channels that simply rebroadcast movies and older recordings need not be archived in full, and your PPV and Music channels hardly count), a year's worth of programming could be distributed across a thousand machines scattered across the net.
That's using today's storage technology, which is increasing dramatically in capacity. The advent of HDTV will set things back, but that's a one-time hit. I would imagine that within the next decade and a half we'll be seeing systems designed to do exactly what we're talking about here. The major obstacle is not the technology, it's reticence from the broadcasters who own the content.
Based on Google's latest jump into the catalog market, it won't be long before we start hitting tv.google.com to catch up on our favorite shows.
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