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Coming soon: Google TV?
An anonymous reader writes "Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are quietly developing new search tools for digital video, reports ZDNet. Google's effort, until now secret, is arguably the most ambitious of the three, the report states. It quotes sources familiar with the plan saying the search giant is courting broadcasters and cable networks with a new technology that would do for television what it has already done for the Internet: sort through and reveal needles of video clips from within the haystack archives of major network TV shows."
Of a WebTV competitor? Everyone remember the old WebTVs that Microsoft had?
If I'm not mistaken, vast quantities of tv archive, much of it from the "golden age" when people expected their educational programs to be presided over by professors, is in the public domain. I'd love to be able to dig up some early BBC2.
Not in the US it isn't. Copyright protection still extends into the 1920's 'round here. We gotta keep Mickey safe!
~Warning!~ The above is encrypted using rot676!
Sounds more like TV Guide, rather than content itself.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
search with a pay per view service on TV shows
I use http://www.tvtorrents.net/ to catch up on my tv
Free XBox, PS2
You are mistaken. In the United States, the vast majority of recorded works remain under copyright. It does not matter that nobody can contact the rightsholders to get permission, you can not use it. Thank Disney / Universal / Viacom / Time Warner / Fox for that one. The reality is that big media does not want to compete with the public domain.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Google engineers may want to add information to their database, but that would require actually wading through millions of hours of bad television.
Actually, Google's idea is to use the closed-caption feed text for tagging, so nobody has to watch anything. IMHO, this is a brilliant strategy because (obviously) closed-captioning by its natuire offers high correlation between the text and images in any given section of video.
What you mean like this?
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A large proportion of the BBC's and a fair proportion of Channel 4's current history educational programming is presented by real academics. Not necessarily "professors" (which is a specific academic-arena job, not entirely related to qualifications), but real academics.
Think of most of the history programs where you see the presenter, instead of hearing a narrator; plenty of those presenters have "proper" academic jobs. IIRC, even the "what the victorians did for us" guy, despite his silly costumes etc, is a pretty highly qualified man...
By my recollection, the "golden age" you referred to consisted mostly of leather-elbow-pad wearing crusties with a blackboard on the Open University. And they didn't represent any golden age of educational programming to my mind...
(educational programming, at its best, presents real and somewhat accurate information, but does so in an engaging manner; neither half of the package is optional)
I worked on a project a couple of years ago with a product from a company called Virage which did this very thing (in fact, it looks like I'm still on their front page). It basically mapped clip timings to the transcript, and allowed searching through the transcript for a phrase, at which point the user could simply click and start the video from that point.
We used it to archive thousands of hours of public meetings, which became available for search about an hour after the meeting was finished. When I did the training at their facility I know they had contracts with lots of major broadcasters, including MLB.
One interesting thing about their software was the clip plugins which allowed you to automatically create clips based on keywords in the transcript (or the speech-to-text), movements, or even facial recognition.
I could easily see this happening for all kinds of televised programs and, let me tell you, is really frickin cool.
Random Musings
Here's an excerpt from their front page: You used to be able to sign up for a free trial (now you have to e-mail them) but the top-10 "search" words for TV were interesting. Osama Bin-Laden always held the #1 spot, and Martha Stewart was popular too.
-Fred
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American Public." - H.L. Mencken
Do you really believe this MPAA company line? If 80 percent of films LOST MONEY, even the 1 in 5 film that was a monster hit wouldn't be able to pick up the slack. Don't think I'm being a spin doctor file sharer, either. Like the RIAA, these people have no qualms about spinning the books to make it LOOK like they're bleeding money when they're really racking it in. They do this primarily for two reasons: 1) tax breaks, 2) to keep the royalty money away from those who only see them once the movie "evens." Writers get FUCKED out of their minds all the time because of this sort of thing. An average new writer will write a script for about 50-60k after taxes, but with a royalty rate of about 3-5 percent of the net. OK, groovy. Think of having a just a piece of Spider Man's pie. Then, think about this: do you know that by Hollywood's "math," Spider Man actually LOST money? Yeah, it amazes me they get away with it too. Hollywood isn't run by Jews, it's run by former Enron lackeys.
If it was broadcast unencrypted over the air, I don't see why it should be illegal to download it on the net.
Easy: because you don't own the copyright and you didn't license it (unlike the TV stations, which pay for you watching shows on TV in exchange for viewer statistics, which translate to advertising dollars). Just because you can steal something doesn't mean it should be legal.
To paraphrase from the previous poster who said "better then in Canada where they charge you in Taxes for the CBC, even if you don't own a TV," basically if you don't own a TV then being charged for television programming through taxes is unfair and ideally only those that watched the public programming should get charged.
Whats crazy is that because of this the British Government actually developed equipment to detect whether or not you have a television in your home from the street. They drive around special TV detecting vans ensuring that noone tries to shirk the tv license fee/tax.
TV detecting has been going on for 52 years now.
Insane!
Of course there is the other side of the argument, that public broadcasting has benefits to you even if you don't watch it yourself.
That TV detecting thing was unreal when I first heard about it.
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...