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Google Moves Into Video

Posted by Hemos on from the finally-tipping-their-hand dept.

prostoalex writes "Google will start indexing previously aired content from ABC, PBS, Fox News and C-SPAN and offer it as part of its Web search. No fancy speech-to-text recognition, just the closed captioning provided by the television networks, and no direct links to videocontent either." Right now, most of the channels are SF Bay area stations, but obviously more will be coming along. I saw a demo of this about six months or so ago - it's pretty cool, and interesting to see how far it has come.

8 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Whoops by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    'detrimental performance'? Google? If they can't handle a slashdotting, who can?

    Video Google (Beta)

  2. Focus on searching by Underholdning · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I know googles mission is to index all the information out there - and they're on the right track. This is probably a step in the right direction, but IMHO it's too early.
    I'd much rather have them to spend time presenting the currently indexed information. It's almost impossible to find information on any piece of hardware these days without having to walk through dozens of pages trying to sell that piece of hardware.

    --
    Underholdning.info
  3. When I can Google.... by jmcmunn · · Score: 2, Insightful


    When I can Google the entire closed caption script of every epsiode of the Simpsons and Family Guy, I'll be a happy man!

    (And yes, I realize that those sites are actually out there somewhere, but I want the text straight from the horse's mouth so to speak)

  4. Re:Not as good as it sounds by LocoMan · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I have added subtitles to a few videos (I work on a video production place, and sometimes we get a video in english that a company wants subtitled in spanish for their people to see, or a video we made for them in spanish subtitled to english to distribute internationally to their clients), and subtitles/captions most of the times must be shorter than what was said (specially in fast dialogue) or most people will just not have enough time to read what was said. The general rule of using text in video is that it must be there on screen at least enough time to read it twice at a leisurely pace. Of course, this can't be used when doing subtitles or captions, but you can't really expect people to read as fast as it's spoken or more often than not they won't have finished reading by the time it switches to the next piece of text.

    Not sure if you've seen it, but you should see some of the spanish subtitles I've read... sometimes even entire pieces of conversations are changed because the correct translation would take too long on the screen to read... and of course there are the odd translations that are completely off the mark (I remember a version of the wing commander movie I saw where the name of the main ship, the Tiger's Claw, even if it was written several times on the movie, kept being translated at the "Tiger's Clock")

  5. Re:Not as good as it sounds by earthman · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Keep in mind that not everybody is a highly trained speedreader. Sometimes you must summarize, otherwise you end up with either a screen full of text, or the captions flashing by like subliminal messages.

    Of course there is no excuse for errors in subtitling if they had plenty of time for checking it.

  6. Re:great.. just great by wuzfuzzy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Rumsfelds comments are in perfect English. This has been debated here before. This is a known known.

  7. Re:Not as good as it sounds by LWATCDR · · Score: 4, Insightful

    1. Many times life time deaf people can not read as fast as hearing people.
    2. Captions have a limited bandwidth. usually 60 chars a second.
    3. For the pop up style captions on most recorded TV shows there is first a build time follows by a display command. The build can not during a commercial brake so you have to wait until the show starts again.
    4. To do a good job captioning takes a long time. As much as 10 hours to do one hour of captioning. Corners get cut.
    5. Text takes space on the screen.
    Captioning does provide a good way to search video. I would love to see a hack for say myth tv where it monitors cnn, or msnbc or the news channel of your choice for key words. When it finds them it starts to record.

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  8. Linux references by tji · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I did a search for "Linux" to try out the site. It came up with an amusing reference from an episode of NCIS.

    " One man's linux is another's Os/2. (Laughs) I hear that." ...

    NCIS