AOL Buys Video Search Firm

Eric Newman writes "TheStreet.com is reporting that America Online has purchased Truveo.com. From the article: 'Truveo has a proprietary technology called visual crawling that lets it automatically discover video files on Web pages, enabling customers to see updated information on news, sports and entertainment. The acquisition, which closed Dec. 21, was AOL's fifth last year. News of the deal wasn't released until Tuesday. Terms were not disclosed.' Note that the deal closed the same week that Google bought a 5% stake in AOL, in part to collaborate on video technology."

Comments

the true meaning

[User 956]

'Truveo has a proprietary technology called visual crawling that lets it automatically discover video files on Web pages, enabling customers to see updated information

And by "updated information", of course, they mean "porn".

Re:the true meaning

[LeeItson]

Why of course.... didn't you know that is what the internet is for?

Re:the true meaning

[thaerin]

"Ding. You've got mail!" has now been replaced with "Bow chica bow wow. You got porn!"

Didn't Google

[dbucowboy]

already implement an effective video search technology?

Re:Didn't Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Shhhhh. Don't let them know what the Internet is for.

Re:Didn't Google

[nycguy]

I have a feeling that "didn't google already" is going to become the default response to everything soon.

Re:Didn't Google

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer the sort-of South Park reference "Google already did it."

Re:Didn't Google

[Yocto Yotta]

Sorry, the Simpsons already perfer that sort of South Park reference.

Re:Didn't Google

[Crilen007]

I find that the google video search isnt very effective.
I always find that video game awards thing on there. Or tons of funny movies, which is found everywhere.
I'd like to beable to find videos without having to go through a hoard of garbage first.

How?

[tacokill]

How, excatly, does this thing work? I am not an expert in search technologies but one thing that jumps out at me is this:

How do you index videos and put context around them?

Does it parse the language that is being spoken? Does it read the subtitles? For example, if I snip a 1 minute story on the G-7 summit from CNN, how do you know what the story is about if I don't tell you? To my knowledge, there is no sophisticated technology solution for this aside from reading the subtitles and indexing that.

I've thought about this alot. Everyone and their dog seems to be coming out with a video search engine of somekind and not a single implementation has explained how they are going to do the indexing.

I suppose they could take the Yahoo approach and view/sort each video that is submitted. But that is not a realistic long term solution, IMHO.

Re:How?

[Otter]

Reading Truveo's site, it looks like a) it gets all its metadata from the context in which it's found, not from examining the video itself and b) their real accomplishment is being able to fish through the different layers behind which most news sites put their video. It doesn't sound super-imprressive to me, but AOL seems to disagree.

As for your question -- presumably you could pipe the audio portion to a speech-to-text tool and parse that, no?

Re:How?

[Mantorp]

I'd guess they tag them, but it should be easy enough to test. Submit your G-7 video but say it's a dog on crack then search for both and see which one's a hit.

Re:How?

[Big_Al_B]

The simple technical solution is to embed meta-data in tags.

Some of that can be automatically populated, such as creation date, length and file type. Some has to be manually added, such as title, rating, or genre.

Re:How?

[MoonFog]

So it basically does for videos what Google image search does for images if I've understood this correctly? Not that there's anything wrong with that, it works alright with Google images so far.

Re:How?

[Anonymous Coward]

I expect what they really have is a US patent monopoly on what amounts to the very idea* of trawling for video content. It'll be "proprietary" because they own a patent on doing it. So it's probably ammo for AOL to use against google video searching. I could be entirely wrong about Truveo, but I'm usually not. :-(

(* a patent lawyer will try to tell you "patents only cover implementations of ideas, not the ideas themselves" - but quite visibly in the software industry that's effectively not the case)

Re:How?

[OakDragon]

A quick search turned up two abstracts for video search algorithms:

A Fast Multi-Resolution Block Matching Algorithm for Multiple-Frame Motion Estimation

Efficient Video Similarity Measurement and Searc (probably grad students here)

I felt my brain being damaged while I looked them over, but they appear to employ something similar to image matching with the added component of movement. It looks like if they are implemented as desired, you could find video similar to a reference piece. This is not useful for searching based on a text query, however. But, you could build an index that matched words to a reference library of video clips, then search for matches to your reference clip.

Of course, all the heavy crunching would be used to build a lean, fast search index, hopefully.

Re:How?

[Rei]

What they don't mention is that to get rid of the videos when you're done, all you have to do is pick up your screen and shake it for a bit.

Re:How?

[Otter]

So it basically does for videos what Google image search does for images if I've understood this correctly?

If I understood the Truveo site correctly -- yeah, it's similar to Google image search except with a supposedly better crawler.

Re:How?

[Anonymous Coward]

From your post, it seems like you've forgotten videos also have audio. You don't have to parse every frame for subtitles, you can pipe the audio through some form of speech recognition (or even better, get closed captioning data for the video). Either way, you end up with a transcript of the video, which can then be searched along with text, etc.

Audio is also useful for determining what kind of content you've got. 99% of commercials normalize their track, for example.

Re:How?

[systmoadownfreak]

it looks like a) it gets all its metadata from the context in which it's found, not from examining the video itself

I think you're right about that. If it was actually crawling the video itself I believe that would be breaching the copyright violation since the crawler would be acessing information that would not be publicly available. I'm almost positive that there is no way that major movie corporations would agree to letting aol just search through their content and make it searchable that way. I mean we already have the metatag style system search for mp3's, so it's not exactly the newest idea. I mean plus, this company had been around before, just not through AOL.

I tried visual crawling once

[digitaldc]

but I only saw a slow-moving floor.

But seriously folks, the search engine works rather well. Its interesting to note that the ads on truveo are by google, and http://video.google.com/ is another viable alternative.

Even though we are just getting started, we have already indexed an extensive collection of web video that you will not find in any other search engine.
Google will soon take care of that.

proprietary technology

[Anonymous Coward]

so preg_match is proprietary now? i knew those php guys would sell out...

yawn... wake me up when its something new

[skiingyac]

truveo.com is basically google image but for video... Take google's image search crawler logic, replace jpg with mpg (or rather wmv or flash...) and voila. explain why truveo.com is so awesome?

Re:yawn... wake me up when its something new

[Firewalker_Midnights]

It's awesome because it's been bought by AOL, you know, Awesome Online... The internet's largest provider of awesome internet experiences.

You've got

[OSS_ilation]

Video! Now, please wait while new content is loaded. Loading...

Re:You've got

[RedNovember]

The next spambot to be added to your buddylist: PornBuddy! ... ...

Is it spam if you care?

But

[Anonymous Coward]

What did AOL use to buy them? Well, I guess money they saved from making RETARDED COMMERCIALS... 'cough'... sorry

video search, eh?

[192939495969798999]

And now, the stream of p0rn related jokes in 3...2...1...

"Hey, looks like Clippy found 5000 new videos, let's see what ... CLIPPY! You little pervert!"

Useless

[voice_of_all_reason]

This is all assuming the metadata is correct (any um... adult video afficianado knows that's not the case) or even exists. If Joe Grandma uploads something from from camcorder to a personal website, she'll likely skip the ship. I also have a habit of re-encoding most stuff I get from P2P sites, or anything in undesirable formats (.wmv, asf, .mov) which automatically strips the metadata.

AOL has a New Video Portal

[microbrewer]

Check out AOL Hi-Q Video http://hiqvideo.aol.com/

Its video delivered by Kontiki's p2p grid technology .

Wonder if Google will end up delivering content in this Manner .

Re:AOL has a New Video Portal

[hey]

Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player 10 are required - yuck.

Re:AOL has a New Video Portal

[microbrewer]

Yeah that part of it sucks as does activeX they use for the Kontiki plugin but it shows that compamies are taking an interest in Peer to Peer for distribution .

Video search/indexing research

[msbmsb]

Truveo's real accomplishment is their crawler. While this particular site does not do anything that much outside of metadata indexing, there is research currently being done toward effective non-metadata indexing of video content. For one major group of researchers, see the NIST-run TRECVID conference.

Seems like a lame video indexer

[Anonymous Coward]

They should be looking at more effective search technology, like Virage

BTW

[Lord Byron II]

For those who missed the reference:

"The Internet is for Porn" is from the outrageously funny Broadway musical "Avenue Q", a takeoff of Sesame Street.

Monkey in a Box

[Kesch]

Everyone knows that they just use a bunch of monkeys in cages that are continually being shown clips. The monkeys then sort the clips into Porn and Not Porn. Optimization studies have concluded that any further sorting is not worth the huge increase in MEMB(Monkey Effort Measured in Bananas).

Redoundant

[ncurtain]

Patent laws have one overwhelming failing. They lead to agrandisement, where large monopolist groups gobble smaller companies with interesting patents, so that eventually the only people running the internet are the ones big enough at the start of the patent wars to survive -and in fact grow.

There is another problem: Having a monopoly is nothing to do with having a good idea. However, once a cake has been divided it is impossible to get a piece if you are a guest that came late to the party.

It's what killed Netscape and the death of Netscape was the crippling of every other desktop operating system -for example. Everything pours from the many according to their good ideas to the few according to their coffers.

Anti-communism made good.

Why are we quoting thestreet.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't we learned anything? Why do we keep supporting a stupid online rag owned by a bunch of East Coast venture capitalists? Hmmm...I guess they need the money...or Slashdot is planning an IPO....

Free technology...cutout the greedy venture capitalists!!!

Wake Up

[billsoman]

It is nothing like Google's strategy, which (like Yahoo's) is inherently limited and hyper-expensive, depending as it does on doing deals to arrange feeds from content providers, who can decide what to share and who will eventually and inevitably extract their pound of flesh. Truveo's technology does not depend on feeds, nor metadata (notoriously bad). Their servers instantiate and visually crawl the content, including dynamic content, and extract information from the content itself and its context - including subtitles where present and even speech-to-text if necessary. Pulling that off at scale is super hard, and Truveo is doing it. Very cool, ground-breaking, and apparently patent-pending stuff.

RTFA and TTFP before posting, please.

Re:Wake Up

[skiingyac]

In short, did you notice how truveu.com has a place where you you can submit RSS video feeds? That's odd, their visual crawling isn't good enough to find them itself?

I did read the article and a good portion of the truveo website. All I found was marketing speak about how they "visually crawl" the internet and how they visually interpret surrounding content.

Regardless of what they do to interpret the pages & video, it boils down to the fact that they are extracting information content from the pages/videos, indexing them, and searching them. Just because its video, which is the hot topic of the month, doesn't mean it is special.

Interpreting video and speech is nothing new, there are 1000's of ways to extract info... Do they do it a little faster? maybe. Are they really doing hardcore interpretation (i.e., there's a tree in the video or the text "tree" is displayed in the video, so add tree to the extracted info)? Yeah right. Do they index & search it better than yahoo, google, etc.? Doubtful. Are they doing special interpretation of pages to see what is visually next to the videos? Maybe, but search engines have been doing this for years (giving more points to things which render in a large font, etc.) So, my question remains, what are they doing that is so awesome?

SingingFish?

[redwoodtree]

Why would they buy this company when they already own singingfish.com ? I will have to do some research but maybe someone else knows?

Singingfish is was a Seattle based video search and image search company which was picked up by AOL. Kind of weird that they would be two of the same type of company.

Bandwidth?

[WoTG]

Wow. Crawling video will suck up bandwidth -- for both the search engine and the host. I hope it's worth the effort...