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."
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.
Imagine being able to look up an old Seinfeld, and then watch it for fifty cents. Or the latest Smallville, or ...
If anyone can pull this off, it's Google.
Agile Artisans