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Search Battle Heading to Video
loid_void wrote to mention a Wired story covering the video search battle between the major portals. From the article: "As millions of broadband subscribers who missed a wardrobe-malfunction moment on TV can attest, the internet can be a convenient resource for finding much-talked-about events on video. Large net portals and a handful of smaller sites are looking to change that. In recent weeks, Yahoo, Google and MSN have each rolled out services designed to make it easier to upload or locate video online. The portals' rollouts come as a handful of startups and independent film sites are creating tools to make putting video online nearly as simple as publishing text."
I am in a band, and I am also in charge of our website. When I wanted to publish a music video just two months ago, there was NOWHERE that would host it for me. I ended up having to apply for a membership to an independant film online community, and encode my video down to a teeny postage stamp sized thing. If I were doing it today, there are half a dozen site that would host it for free, in high quality DIVX glory.
Besides being heavily abused by self abusers, this will have a few legitimate functions.
All those streaming events that happened a while back.. You know the ones you wanted to watch, but for some reason couldn't will be that much easier to find.
Also, sites that archive important Social events on video will get more hits. I know I have given up after trolling through a few dozen pages of google results. Hopefully you can find a few sources so you won't have to settle for one level of quality, like for JFK's assasination or whatever you need for whatever you need it for.
Really though, porn. Lots of p0rn. Sex is still in the top five searches...
My inner self is ineffable, so don't eff with me.
This may seem off-topic at first, but bear with me...
I have to admit, I've got a lot of sympathy for people who don't want to see particular things on TV--nudity, violence, whatever. I mean, I don't have a problem with it, and I don't think most content is socially harmful, but my preference not to be subjected to shit-sex videos is the same as some Mormon's preference not to see Janet Jackson's nipples.
That's the problem, though--broadcast TV is defined as a "public" medium, partly because everybody can and does receive it in the clear, and partly because (in the US and Canada, at least) spectrum rights are public property, and as such must serve the public interests, meaning that the content on those waves shouldn't be terribly offensive to many people.
But I really, REALLY dislike the idea of government-appointed (or even elected) censors dictating what can go on the air, or imposing after-the-fact fines when broadcasters step out of line.
So I say, fuck broadcasting. Go radical--eliminate the concept of broadcast TV, as we know it. Practical transition problems aside, this could solve a lot of problems. Give those frequencies up to metropolitan-area data transmissions, and get those people online. With the combination of:
1) fast, cheap, ubiquitous Internet access,
2) content providers offering TV-similar video online (streaming TV shows instead of broadcasting them),
3) effective and comprehensive video search capabilities that work at least as well as mid-1990s text search engines.
On the Internet, it's a lot easier to see what you want and avoid what you dislike. The Mormons get their wholesome family crud, and I get my skin flicks and pot jokes. Everybody's happy!
I see the potential for the greatest abuse with a video search engine. Just like bad wesbites use meta-tags and other dirty tricks to get high hits, I can see the same thing with video. But where you can protect yourself against spyware websites by turning off active-x and the such, how do you protect yourself against video. You click on the mpeg and boom, malware.
We need a sandbox for this
Recently, Yahoo launched a beta version of a service called Media RSS that lets anyone with footage submit videos for distribution
How can Yahoo check the content of what is sumbitted? Is there some kind of review?
What happens if NBC decides the "wardrobe malfunction" is their copywrited material and demands it be taken down. Will these searchs make it easier to take down content?
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Nullsoft Streaming Video.
They support MPG and MOV, but not NSV. I can sort of understand the logic behind this, you can watch mpeg anywhere, but the mov part I don't understand. You pretty much have to download the quicktime player to watch mov's.
If they're going to support one major companies streaming format, why not real, wmv and nsv?
I just think supporting any video format, that for the masses (folks that don't know better) requires a download of a player that constantly tries to take over ever file association on your system is wrong. I always tell quicktime "No, please don't try and take over my midi, I have a wavetable card, no, don't take over my other sound and movie formats, please stop bugging me to download additional components" but like a bad child it just keeps bugging me.
NSV was purely a windows thing for a while, but now mplayer and VLC support it. You can watch vp3 encoded videos on any system with those clients on any system. Also on2 has made the vp3 codec open source, and there are versions of it for anything.
Just my critique on one of the new video services. Yeah is sort of rantish, so what?
--toq
Even now, you can use google as a search engine for torrents with the -filetype: .torrent switch.
I can't think of any difference between that and Lokitorrent. Both, as you said, simply make it easier to search for pointers to data. Both Lokitorrent and Google can make the argument that they can't control what they index.
But Google gets away with it, and will get away with the video search, because they're a big company, and big companies tend to get free passes on this sort of thing. It's easy for the RIAA to shut down a college student, but not so easy to shut down a big corporation.