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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."

21 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. Great! by A_Non_Moose · · Score: 3, Funny

    now I can get an error 404 on my TV.

    Just what I wanted.

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  2. Not Again... by krmt · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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."

    1. Re:Not Again... by krmt · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why not the computer then? The TV limits what people can do necessarily. I can't really imagine anyone wanting a keyboard for their TV any more than I can imagine someone buying one for their gamecube. Note that these peripherals don't sell well on systems like video game consoles that are inherently interactive. There's no way someone is going to use one on a machine that is naturally the exact opposite of interactive.

      Producers have spent decades making TV the exact opposite of interactive, and they've done an admirable job of it. I know of no better way to kill your mind than TV, even drugs don't do the job as well or as easily. Then they tried to take this philosophy to the internet with Push technology. Remember when that was the thing? How often do you hear about those guys now? The same way push failed for the internet, interactive TV will fail because it's the antithesis of what people know and love about television. It's not a bad idea, it's just not going to work

      --

      "I may not have morals, but I have standards."

    2. Re:Not Again... by rde · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Why not the computer then?

      Because people are lazy. Given the choice of sitting on their arses and seeing our heroes in glorious high definition is easier than booting, logging on, downloading...

      All this assumes the internet as it is now, of course. For always-on users with speedy access, the computer is as easy. But for the drooling masses television is the first port of call, and if it's available on TV it's not needed elsewhere.

      Also: in the above example, a lengthy search wouldn't be necessary. Interactive->Entertainment->Hot Love Story. Three presses.

      Producers have spent decades making TV the exact opposite of interactive, and they've done an admirable job of it. I know of no better way to kill your mind than TV, even drugs don't do the job as well or as easily.
      QED.

  3. This would be kinda cool. by GuNgA-DiN · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Woohoo!!! by istartedi · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

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  5. Pipe dream by Supa+Mentat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Pipe dream by gnovos · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      Technically, it's already stored... Even the livest of live TV eventually goes into the archives at every TV stattion in the world. All that needs to be done is turn those tape archives into digital archives and connect them together.

      --
      "Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
  6. Nope. Not gonna do it. by terpia · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

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    .sig wanted: Must be concise, funny, and display my cleverness.
    1. Re:Nope. Not gonna do it. by MousePotato · · Score: 4, Funny
      Here here. Your requests are right on the mark at least on my list. Additionally features that I want in truly 'Interactive Television' :
      • A button that takes out the mosaics on the Howard Stern Show and E!'s Wild On series.
      • A button that cancels censor bleeps.
      • A goo feature so Neil Cavuto's head can appear even larger on my 60"
      • Something that also gets rid of the obnoxious ticker display all the news channels are constantly running with 'update' information they refresh like twice a day.
      • A compressor to equalize the sound ending thr cycle of volume up / volue down... no more super quiet talk that makes you pump the volume only to rock the cup of coffee out of my neighbors hand when something loud happens at the high level and forces the volume button down again...
      • Infomercial eliminator mode; a temporary killfile for channels that are displaying 'Paid Programming' from the list of available things to watch when scrolling through the channel guide at 3:30 am.
      • A favorite channels version of the channel guide.
      • How about an auto dial or link mode for commercials that take me to an advertisers website?

      Ah... the list could go on...
  7. Who's going to sue who this time? by prof187 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  8. Fairness by Spoh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

  9. This could be really exciting! by farrellj · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:This could be really exciting! by terpia · · Score: 3, Funny

      I would be nice to be able to say "find all Star Trek episodes that show pictures of older ships named enterprise"...

      Or, if you were like most trekkies, you'd say: "find all frames within Voyager episodes that contain Seven of Nines chest"

      --
      .sig wanted: Must be concise, funny, and display my cleverness.
  10. Others working on this. by instinctdesign · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    forma3
    1. Re:Others working on this. by Glorat · · Score: 3, Informative

      I'm sure a recently graduated student from Imperial College, UK worked on this as a project. Rather than using speech recognition which consumes vast amounts of computing power and probably storage, it took the much easier approach of indexing subtitles to programmes. And since you'd probably be most interested in searching news reports which are almost always subtitled, you end up with a excellent search system without the flaws of speech recognition

  11. An archive exists, but only the catalog is online by Animats · · Score: 4, Informative
    The Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago has a VHS archive of all major Chicago TV broadcasts for the last decade or so, plus other material from earlier periods.

    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.

  12. Is this stuff really new? by chiku · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  13. not exactly news by markj02 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    This kind of work has been going on at CMU, IBM, MIT, and several startups (including Virage) for a number of years. For broadcast TV, you don't even need speech recognition, you can simply use the closed captioning and programming information.

    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.

  14. If you haven't read the article yet... by Alsee · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  15. Finally we can watch a series in the right order! by Mandelbrute · · Score: 3, Interesting
    A lot of Australian TV stations show various programs (eg. B5, Jonathon Creek Mysteries) in the wrong order - or several hours after the correct time to allow more airtime of male footballers dressing up in womens clothing.

    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.