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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.

15 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Not as good as it sounds by ironfrost · · Score: 4, Interesting

    From the article:

    Search engine analyst Charlene Li of Forrester Research said Google's latest innovation is likely to disappoint many people because it doesn't provide a direct link to watch the previously broadcast programming.

    Google instead is displaying up to five still video images from the indexed television programs, as well as snippets from the show's narrative. The search results also will provide a breakdown on when the program aired and when an episode is scheduled to be repeated. Local programming information will be available for those who provide a ZIP code.

    1. Re:Not as good as it sounds by dschuetz · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Google instead is displaying up to five still video images from the indexed television programs, as well as snippets from the show's narrative. The search results also will provide a breakdown on when the program aired and when an episode is scheduled to be repeated. Local programming information will be available for those who provide a ZIP code.

      Hey, even that is an great service. Of course, the closed captioning is rarely very good. I never understand how, on a show that was produced weeks before it was aired, the captions are often messed up, or missing key words. Captions (also on DVD subtitles) seem to be shorthand summaries of what was said, when it's usually possible for them to be exact transcripts.

      Sometimes it's not a big deal, but sometimes they miss an important point or nuance.

      What'd be great, though, is real honest-to-god searching of the audio. I've seen demos where you can literally type in "helicopter," and you'll get hotlinks to the exact times in the video wherever that word was said. It's fscking amazing. Not sure it's a publicly available technology yet, tho...but the capability is definitely out there, and I'm sure we're not the only people playing with this.

    2. Re:Not as good as it sounds by jrumney · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Our mission is to organize the world's information, and that includes the thousands of programs that play on our TVs every day.

      Also not as good as it sounds, apparently "the world" only extends to a few of the major US TV networks.

      BBC already has video online, and they add subtitles to all content broadcast on BBC1 and BBC2, so it should have been easy to include them in the test. Given BBC's attitude towards the internet and making information freely available compared with most commercial broadcasters, they probably would have bent over backwards to help Google with this.

    3. Re:Not as good as it sounds by new500 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      This was the plan that would make video search a killer tool :

      http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_ ra dio/3177479.stm

      Summary : Exiled Director General of the BBC planned to open the whole BBC archive online.

      Makes me think. Did he resign over the Hutton enquiry , or was he pushed out by Murdochs lobbying. Similar timescale.

      I mean, who would watch SKY if you could go online and watch anything the BBC ever produced. OK, almost. BBC don't own the Simpsons. But i bet Discovery would be short a few vieiwers . . anyhow, Spaghetti all round. .

    4. Re:Not as good as it sounds by gobbo · · Score: 2, Interesting
      I never understand how, on a show that was produced weeks before it was aired, the captions are often messed up, or missing key words.

      Most people don't realize that captioning is done in near-real-time, and considering that, the captioners do an AMAzing job, you should watch them in action.

      --
      Damn those pesky terrorists
  2. Great for torrenting by the_unknown_soldier · · Score: 1, Interesting

    A perfectly situated "I'm feeling lucky" to the torrent would mean that direct video is irrelevant. Also, interesting that you can read 3 pages of a book searched by google, yet the ip implications of putting video on would make it nearly impossible.

  3. Blinx.com by joeykiller · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As cool as Google is, I also think Blinx.com's search deserves mentioning. According to their white paper they transcribe video content on the fly, and you can even set up "smart searches" which notifies you when new content matching your search becomes available.

    This apparently only applies to video content available on the web, but I guess it could potentially be done with TV content as well. It seems to me like this -- if it works -- is one step ahead of Google's approach.

  4. ahhhh by TechnologyX · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This will be great to grab the latest soundbytes from when Newscasters completely blow their commentary.. Like the woman that said that President Clinton may have been gay, when she meant to say Lincoln.

    I'd say this is Jon Stewart's new homepage

    --
    Slashdot sucks
  5. Needs tweaking by costas · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The results seem to be skewed when the search term is a person or character in the show: check out the search for Carson and notice how almost every result is the Carson Daily show with hardly any news on Johny Carson --because every second line in the closed captions is "Carson >".

  6. Re:When I can Google.... by stutterbug · · Score: 2, Interesting

    And there is where Google will get shivved.

    I used to manage the Discovery Channel Canada's web site at a time when we were transforming the site from an online science news magazine to a video-on-demand supplier of Discovery Channel Canada material. One of the things a few of us were interested in doing was offering up transcripts of aired programs. Doing it was simple, even then, since most TV tuner cards were capable of grabbing the captioning info from a vertical interval and dumping it to a text file. The main problem, I thought, was that the material was always ALL CAPS and chock-a-block with seplling mistaks (in my own opinion, I thought that after the show had aired, the captions were actually useless for anything more than internal archival purposes). The real problem, though, was that often (really often), we didn't actually own the copyright.

    Commonly, an outside company produces a show for a broadcaster. Once the show has aired, they are free to sell it to other broadcasters in other regions. So they are particularly feverish about protecting their material from the Internet. I mean, why would a broadcaster in Germany want to buy a television program translated into German if its English transcripts were available on the Internet? Well, I thought that was a garbage argument, but the lawyers didn't. In fact, the supply contracts with outside show producers were so fanatically exact, that using the captions for anyone other than the hard of hearing was simple out of the question.

    So if the broadcaster can't use that material, what makes Google think they can?

    Besides, do you think for one moment that Fox will let anyone use stills and complete transcripts of The Simpsons? Not in a million years, man.

    I see busy days ahead for http://chillingeffects.org/.

  7. Things that will happen before it's a real service by digitalgimpus · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I don't doubt this will become a non-beta, homepage service. Just like GIS... .though a few things will happen:

    1. Facial recognition will be around. It already exists, several companies have offered such products for video, mainly for the purpose of the entertainment industry.

    2. Speech Recognition for indexing.

    I've got a feeling right now they are just trying to see what type of reaction 'video' gets. Just to guage the interest.

    It's not bad already, it's pretty cool. But I'm betting this is only the beginning.

  8. It is possible for them to do more than one thing by blorg · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...you know; they do have ~2k employees. By your logic, we wouldn't have Google News, GMail, G Groups, G Desktop, Froogle, Orkut, G Suggest, G Print, G Calculator, pdf/doc search, Picasa, etc. etc.*

    Google employees get to spend a day a week working on a project that interests them - good for employee morale, and some of these pet projects have turned out very useful indeed.

    *yes, I know some of these were originally purchases.

  9. Neat by sonamchauhan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I am doing something very similar in my apartment: an always-on mini-itx media server that (among other things) records free-to-air TV with teletext and provides me an interface to the teletext. While teletext isn't completely accurate, it makes for a huge body of searchable content.

    Google instead is displaying up to five still video images from the indexed television programs, as well as snippets from the show's narrative. The search results also will provide a breakdown on when the program aired and when an episode is scheduled to be repeated. Local programming information will be available for those who provide a ZIP code.

    I think Google is aiming to stay within fair-use boundaries. (And also avoiding taking on a needless bandwidth burden serving video).

    It would be possible for people to use "Google Video Search" to identify interesting TV content outside their local area, then request snippets a P2P manner from users whose computers were in the local area of the broadcast.

    What are the fair-use guidelines for recording and sharing of free-to-air TV content, can someone say?

    TiVO got US FCC permission for:
    its customers [to] receive digital broadcasts and share them with up to 10 other TiVo units that share the same customer account. .
    However, if 10 TiVOs "share a customer account", they belong to the same person (or to his family).

    Is sharing, say, a 5 minute clip of a news broadcast between different computers belonging to different people allowed?

  10. Re:great.. just great by real+gumby · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Rumsfeld's comment is an unremarkable epistemological truism. I don't understand the pseudo-uproar. Is there really anyone who doesn't believe what he said?

    Given he's made so many outrageous (and I believe false and mendacious statements) this is such a bizarre thing to pick on.

  11. Yahoo and google 2 different approaches?? by Darthmalt · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Google looks to be providing transcripts and information of videos whereas Yahoo is providing the videos themselves.

    Compare the results of these two searches for the daily show

    YAHOO
    GOOGLE

    Surprisingly GOOGLE doesnt actually show the daily show just programs that mention it.