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AOL Buys Video Search Firm

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the internet-is-for-porn dept.

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."

3 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How? by OakDragon · · Score: 2, Informative
    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.

    --
    Dark Reflection
  2. AOL has a New Video Portal by microbrewer · · Score: 2, Informative

    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 .

  3. Wake Up by billsoman · · Score: 2, Informative
    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.