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."

Comments

More like TV Guide

[GillBates0]

They're not talking about hosting video...they're just talking about making online video content more searchable/accessible.

Sounds more like TV Guide, rather than content itself.

Re:Coupled with a pay per view model...

[savagedome]

search with a pay per view service on TV shows

I use http://www.tvtorrents.net/ to catch up on my tv

Re:This is great!

[Zork the Almighty]

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.

Re:Metadata

[saddino]

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.

Video search?

[barcodez]

What you mean like this?

Re:This is great!

[rdc_uk]

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)

Already done and functional...TVeyes

[mecredis]

Not sure what the patent situation is for this technology, but a small company TVEyes (full disclosure: I used to be an intern there) has already done this. Check out their website here.

Here's an excerpt from their front page:

TVEyes makes Radio & TV searchable by keyword, phrase or topic - just as you would use a search engine for text. With a fast growing network of stations monitored worldwide, TVEyes provides the technology and the content.

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