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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."
great... more reasons to sit in front of a pc
I had an imaginary sig once, he said I was a loser and ran off.
Now I won't have to search for the remote
Hmm, now where can I get a remote with an "I'm feeling lucky" button? In Korea maybe?
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.
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.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
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
No results found
Suggestions:
- Try lowering your standards to an obscene level
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
TV Guide info and synopsis information is already available. Even a basic search using this information would be very useful to many people. Google engineers may want to add information to their database, but that would require actually wading through millions of hours of bad television. I volunteer to watch all the anime. The good:bad ratio there is significantly better.
AnimeNEXT anime convention
I'm really looking forward to this.
I'm using Google's image-search very often (and love it!) and I could really use video clip-search.
However, considering how well many sites hide the actual video clips (and I'm not talking about porn), I guess Google might face strong resistance from content providers (wasn't there last week a story about a porn website sueing Google over image-search?)
I don't need a signature.
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.
--
make install -not war
when will adult-movies.google.com be available?
implement targeted commericals? Still, it would be better than seeing tampon and herpes medication ads (for me at least).
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.
,will work. Searching through them can be made better than just a text match.
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
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.
What you mean like this?
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The coolest thing would be if you search for a quote you rememebered from an old simpsons episode, but could not rememeber which one. video.google.com, "I'm Feeling Lucky" and after a second it starts streaming that episode.
:-)
The future is soooo cool
All interpreted languages are abstractions over Lisp
It would be really cool if google made a TV guide search. For example, if I could go to Google UK and type "BBC1 NOW" - google would tell me what was on BBC1 at the moment. It would be even better if it allowed to specifiy a date and time eg "BBC1 24/12/04 22:00". Now that would be really useful:)
On the subject of useful things for google - how about a currency converter? The convenience of being able to go to Google and type "$10 in £" rather than using XE.com would be pretty cool as well.
I'm a little concerned about the future very high speed Internet being used just like television by the masses. The internet has so much more potential for education and free uncensored flow of information, but developments like these might make a lot of people use the the net only as another way to watch TV. That is a smarter way to make them dumber.
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
Google's trying to bring TV to the Web the same way they're bringing books to the Web
This is a weird way to describe what Google does... if they bring anything to the Web, it's the Web itself!
But here's the best part of the entire article, IMHO:
Google has been working with National Public Radio and others to index transcripts of audio already on the Internet so that clips can be searchable from its news search engine.
Personally, I would use the video search engine only occasionally... but there is an unbelievable amount of high-quality content that NPR provides on its website, going back years -- interviews, shows, projects, special reports, hell, even Car Talk. The radio thing is a real gem, and I can't wait to use it.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
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
I can't agree that the digital archives of any major network are in such a state that finding a clip can be described in terms of needle and haystack.
From my work with the BBC, on a project known as Motion Gallery I'd say that video footage already in a digital format is extensively catalogued and mapped to keyword architecture.
I am also aware of at least 4 other digital archive projects within the BBC. Some of these cover the digital storage of newly filmed material, others like Creative Archive are relevant to making historical footage available online.
The needle in a haystack metaphor is really only relevant to archive materials that are not digital and have been stored on tape or film. Then there is an issue around the cataloguing and ease of searching such material. Even so, the BBC has it's own search system known as Infax. Other broadcasters, such as ITN, have already made their text based archive search available on the Internet.
I think Google can certainly bring some interesting technology and approaches to searching video archive content. This could be in the area of better indexing for existing digital archive footage, or perhaps a search aggregation of text based archive systems in much the same way they provide an image search service now.
Can Google overcome the problem of poorly catalogued tape based media archives? In short no. They could however assist organisations to effectively structure their keyword hierachies when migrating to a digital video format.
Brought to you by the author of such childrens' classics as "Some Kittens can Fly!" and "All Dogs go to Hell."
If you read the MPEG-7 proposals, you'll find that there are provisions for searching based on varying granularities of characteristics of the video and audio both in metadata and within the clips themselves.
I wonder if the frameworks that these guys are developing are within the standard, or if they're going on their own to do this to sidestep patent licensing obligations?
In 1999 a system went live at the BBC that allowed them to search metadata on all their video archives.
I mean, ALL. Even the old stuff - 1870s, IIRC.
They had a big (stonking) database which held the metadata (right down to the equivalent of "This image clip is of Princess Diana wearing a blue dress and kissing a baby"), which was extracted and put into a proper document search engine.
A web front-end was created that performed used the document search engine to get a list of results, then did a lookup to the original database to get the reference for the video clip in question.
Said reference telling you where on which shelf of which row of which large shed to go and look for the video tape/film reel/wax cylinder that contains the clip in question.
Darn good system, reasonably good performance, sucky technology (java applet using CORBA to connect to Java server, HTTP to connect to document search engine, JDBC to connect to original data source).
How do I know this? I wrote the darn thing..
Of course, it'll be obsolete and replaced by now.
I hope.
~cederic
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...