Google Moves Into Video

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.

Comments

Not as good as it sounds

[ironfrost]

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.

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[dschuetz]

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.

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[LocoMan]

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")

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[LWATCDR]

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.

Focus on searching

[Underholdning]

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.

Re:Focus on searching

[odyrithm]

try for example: pentium p4 -buy

- is your friend, use it wisely.

already started

[stefankoegl]

indexing has already started december 2004 and the services was launched today at http://video.google.com/

great.. just great

[apostrophesemicolon]

now how will C-Span's coverage of White House speeches deal with teh great use of English literature such as the following?

Bush:
"nucular"
"abu.. abu.. abu.. abu grabby prison"

Rumsfeld:
"here are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."

the submitter forgot the link

[zr-rifle]

it's obviously video.google.com

I for one welcome our search engine overlords...

[bigdaddyhame]

Google = SkyNet.

So when exactly does the Google A.I. go online? Just curious so I can start caching weapons in the desert.