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GoogleTV Coming Soon?
An anonymous reader writes "Flexbeta writes that Google is looking to hire a full time project manager for GoogleTV in Mountain View, CA. The candidate must posses experience developing/launching products in one or more of the following areas: interactive TV, set-top-boxes, personal video recorders, video-on-demand, IP TV or cable TV technologies. Google recently announced their interest in the text messaging market by releasing GoogleTalk; this came to no surprise to many that were already hearing rumors month's before GoogleTalk was released. Google is also working on providing free WiFi service to some regions of the San Francisco bay area. Google is without a doubt expanding their operations beyond the search engine market which makes the possibility of GoogleTV realistic. "
Google recently announced their interest in the text messaging market by releasing GoogleTalk;
But that should really read "Instant Messaging" since Text Messaging, at least in the UK, is synonymous with SMS on mobile telephones,
unless GoogleTalk does this?
C17H21NO4
Many daily activities present information using a written or spoken stream of words: television, radio, telephone calls, meetings, face-to-face conversations with others. Often people can benefit from additional information about the topics that are being discussed. Supplementing television broadcasts is particularly attractive because of the passive nature of TV watching. Interaction is severely constrained, usually limited to just changing the channel; there is no way to more finely direct what kind of information will be presented.
Indeed, several companies have explored suggesting web pages to viewers as they watch TV. For example, the Intercast system, developed by Intel, allows entire HTML pages to be broadcast in unused portions of the TV signal. A user watching TV on a computer with a compatible TV tuner card can then view these pages, even without an Internet connection. NBC transmitted pages via Intercast during their coverage of the 1996 Summer Olympics. The Interactive TV Links system, developed by VITAC (a closed captioning company) and WebTV (now a division of Microsoft), broadcasts URLs in an alternative data channel interleaved with closed caption data [17,2]. When a WebTV box detects one of these URLs, it displays an icon on the screen; if the user chooses to view the page, the WebTV box fetches it over the Internet.
For both of these systems the producer of a program (or commercial) chooses relevant documents by hand. In fact, the producer often creates new documents specifically to be accessed by TV viewers. To our knowledge, there has been no previous work on automatically selecting web pages that a user might want to see while watching a TV program.
In this paper we study the problem of finding news articles on the web relevant to the ongoing stream of TV broadcast news. We restrict our attention to broadcast news since it is very popular and information-oriented (as supposed to entertainment-oriented).
No banking, but Google Wallet?
don't forget about these guys: http://veoh.com/team.php
Perhaps you haven't seen Current TV yet... Not only do they allow viewer content submissions, allow "pod" viewing on their website, and have a radically different approach to showing their content, they are also apparently heavily backed by Google.
Now, none of that is really that important. What *is* important, IMHO, is how Current TV does advertising. They don't seem to be having a lot of commercials in your standard sense (they do have some -- but I guess because they are mostly submissions they don't need as much revenue to pay $1m/episode salaries) they do have integrated commercial content (i.e. a "pod" about Pioneer's latest in-dash navigation system which uses XM traffic data to reroute you).
I am sometime mesmerized by Current TV and sit there watching repeated content because it's *that* interesting. I don't particularly care for the blatant advertising "pods" but they are sometimes interesting the first time through.
If you haven't seen Current TV, check it out.
Google's bought quite a bit. Read: Keyhole, Blogger.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
There is a new network on DirectTV feeds called 'Current TV'
:)
It uses google search data for news broadcasts and story selection. It also lets users submit content.
Google runs or is somehow related to a new television network. http://www.current.tv/
I've been watching this new network on DirectTV.
Basically they do serveral things well. The network is really addictive to watch.
- All (almost all) shows are 7 minutes long unless they are REALLY interesting.
- Viewers can submit video's and Current.tv airs them.
- They use google search statistics to find new things to air.
- They have a 'Google News' segment every half hour that is a short news broadcast based on Google search statistics.
- You can bet that Advertisers are buying these statistics too.
It is kind of like randomly searching the web without having to use the HUGE amount of energy it takes to push the mouse around.