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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."

11 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

  2. 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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    For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  3. 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
  4. 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...
  5. 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

  6. 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
  7. 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
  8. 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.

  9. 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

  10. 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.