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

The saddest thing

[Zork the Almighty]

Yeah, but just try getting at that content. It will be like scholarly journals. Anyone can search and find anything, but then you have to mortgage your house for an annual subscription to view the content. The promise of a true digital library is a long way off, so long as we have insane copyright laws.

Re:The saddest thing

[CreatureComfort]

Apparently you live in a better world than most of us. Just about all of the "art" produced by the major motion picture studios is sensationalistic garbage or sentimental drivel. Copyright law helps fuel this descent to mediocrity by protecting income on poorly done junk and since poorly done is generally so much cheaper than well made, we get nothing but what the studios think they can make a fast buck on. Yes, if copyright was stong and stongly enforced, we would have to pay the $8 to see a one time flop for "entertainment" value and we would never see it a second time or bother to buy a DVD. With file sharing, I stay away from the more marginal offerings in the theatres and if I do want to check one out I'll download it for free, watch it once, and then delete it, or check it out from my local library. If it turns out to be something worth while I'll go buy the DVD.

For actual pieces of "art", I gladly pay. All three of the LOTR movies qualify, for me, on that account. I saw all three in the theatres at least twice each, I downloaded them from bit torrent to watch at home and pre-ordered the extended editions as soon as pre-ordering was availabe. For a quality storyline and production the studio made every bit of the money they would have made copyright or no.

So in contradiction to your statement, strong copyright only fosters the degradation and propping up of marginal and poor art, while good art will prosper whether it is protected or not. People are generally more than willing to pay a fair price for a quality product. What we all object to is being forced to pay a ridiculous price for a lousy product, just to protect some moron multi-millionaires next pet project.

Retroactive recopyright

[Doc Ruby]

Once we can search old TV content, it will become much more valuable. Even shows whose copyrights expired before the era of indefinite extensions will be valuable "property", though their public domain status means they have no "owner". So Congress will create owners, by retroactively extending copyrights on that content to current corporations.

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

[thebes]

The problem is, instead of doing it for a reasonable cost, like 25 or 50 cents, any company will try to gorge consumers and will charge $1.99 thereby removing any chance of it lowering p2p traffic.

Seaching is not the same as web searching

[acomj]

The one thing google does really well is harness the "collective intelligence" of the web. Basically it assumes that people creating the web pages and links by hand have some skill and will only link to "reputable" sites. For the most part this works pretty well, although I've been pointed to excellent technicall references that google hasn't found.

Searching for documents on your computer is different. People aren't hotlinking your documents. The computer has to try and summerize that 20 page report or just do a straight text match web search. (Maybe using some semantic tricks.) To do this right is really hard. I worked for a start up that used Ontology based searching, trying to understand the text and match it to search criteria. It kinda worked sometimes which isn't nearly good enough.

I've been tagging my stills. I have little illusion that anything but me typing in descriptions into the metadata files which are kinda like xml ,will work. Searching through them can be made better than just a text match.

The only way this video might work is that video is sent in "packages" ie lots of video to edit down and a story. Close captioning would be usefull as well. Indexing on the text part and matching the video would be a great and very useful thing to these companies.

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

[wowbagger]

Imagine being able to look up an old Seinfeld, and then watch it for fifty cents.

Isn't this a violation of the Geneva convention?

Honestly - while there are great volumes of potentially good shows to index, the question is are those shows actually available to be indexed, or will this index be full of "Friends", "Seinfeld", "Fear Factor" and other utter dreck?

Of course, in many ways that will simply parallel the rest of the 'Net - I remember back when Alta Vista was king of the search engines having to add "and not homepage and not hotlinks and not 'jump page' and not 'cool links'" and half a dozen other terms to filter the crap out - unfortunately while Google does a fair job of picking out the gems from the trash it does not allow for that kind of boolean searching. Yes, you can enter exclusion terms, but Google seems to regard those more as a suggestion than as an absolute prohibition.

Also, given the absense of cross-links in TV, how will Google derive a pagerank-style metric for your search, to prevent your searches from being filled with results from "Maury" and "Jerry Springer"?

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

[AvantLegion]

Don't know about legal, but if you pay for cable/satellite TV, as far as I'm concerned, you're in the moral clear in downloading episodes you've missed of shows you watch (provided you do indeed have the channels those shows are broadcast on as part of your paid package).

I have a TiVO, so I don't "miss" much, but sometimes a show like Lost comes along, where I don't hear about it until after it's underway. Downloading the file over Bittorrent is the same as watching a videotape my buddy made. As long as the person "copying" actually receives the channel it's shown on.

I'm sure the legal mumbo jumbo doesn't make that distinction, of course.