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Coming soon: Google TV?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Tue Nov 30, 2004 09:38 AM
from the wouldn't-that-be-special dept.
from the wouldn't-that-be-special dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are quietly developing new search tools for digital video, reports ZDNet. Google's effort, until now secret, is arguably the most ambitious of the three, the report states. It quotes sources familiar with the plan saying the search giant is courting broadcasters and cable networks with a new technology that would do for television what it has already done for the Internet: sort through and reveal needles of video clips from within the haystack archives of major network TV shows."
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yay (Score:4, Funny)
Cool (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cool (Score:3, Funny)
No more http://www.google.com/search?q=remote [google.com]
I'm feeling lucky (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'm feeling lucky (Score:2)
Google's big chance... (Score:2, Interesting)
People are realizing (yahoo, MSN) that large and bloated is not the way to go.
This is great! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This is great! (Score:2, Informative)
Not in the US it isn't. Copyright protection still extends into the 1920's 'round here. We gotta keep Mickey safe!
Re:This is great! (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:This is great! (Score:4, Informative)
Think of most of the history programs where you see the presenter, instead of hearing a narrator; plenty of those presenters have "proper" academic jobs. IIRC, even the "what the victorians did for us" guy, despite his silly costumes etc, is a pretty highly qualified man...
By my recollection, the "golden age" you referred to consisted mostly of leather-elbow-pad wearing crusties with a blackboard on the Open University. And they didn't represent any golden age of educational programming to my mind...
(educational programming, at its best, presents real and somewhat accurate information, but does so in an engaging manner; neither half of the package is optional)
Parent
BBC is putting ALL of their content online free... (Score:2)
Assuming you've paid your UK TV license fee of course.
Re:BBC is putting ALL of their content online free (Score:3, Informative)
Whats crazy is that because of this the British Government actually developed equipment to detect whether or not you have a television in your home from the street. They drive around spec
The saddest thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The saddest thing (Score:2)
The digital library exists. But to get access you have to go to the paper library.
Re:The saddest thing (Score:2)
That said, the university pays several hundred thousand dollars a year for this (and probably into the millions). I'll ask our department librarian the next time I get a chance (since she's also on my thesis committee!).
Over and out.
Re:The saddest thing (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently you live in a better world than most of us. Just about all of the "art" produced by the major motion picture studios is sensationalistic garbage or sentimental drivel. Copyright law helps fuel this descent to mediocrity by protecting income on poorly done junk and since poorly done is generally so much cheaper than well made, we get nothing but what the studios think they can make a fast buck on. Yes, if copyright was stong and stongly enforced, we would have to pay the $8 to see a one time f
Re:The saddest thing (Score:3, Informative)
Coupled with a pay per view model... (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine being able to look up an old Seinfeld, and then watch it for fifty cents. Or the latest Smallville, or ...
If anyone can pull this off, it's Google.
Re:Coupled with a pay per view model... (Score:5, Informative)
I use http://www.tvtorrents.net/ [tvtorrents.net] to catch up on my tv
Parent
Re:Coupled with a pay per view model... (Score:2)
I was envisioning a legal service. ;)
Re:Coupled with a pay per view model... (Score:3, Insightful)
I have a TiVO, so I don't "miss" much, but sometimes a show like Lost comes along, where I don't hear about it until after it's underway. Downloading the file over Bittorrent is the same as watching a videotape my buddy made. As long as t
Re:Coupled with a pay per view model... (Score:3, Informative)
If it was broadcast unencrypted over the air, I don't see why it should be illegal to download it on the net.
Easy: because you don't own the copyright and you didn't license it (unlike the TV stations, which pay for you watching shows on TV in exchange for viewer statistics, which translate to advertising dollars). Just because you can steal something doesn't mean it should be legal.
Re:Coupled with a pay per view model... (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't this a violation of the Geneva convention?
Honestly - while there are great volumes of potentially good shows to index, the question is are those shows actually available to be indexed, or will this index be full of "Friends", "Seinfeld", "Fear Factor" and other utter dreck?
Of course, in many ways that will simply parallel the rest of the 'Net - I remember back when Alta Vista was king of the search engines having to
I've tested the beta... (Score:5, Funny)
No results found
Suggestions:
- Try lowering your standards to an obscene level
More like TV Guide (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds more like TV Guide, rather than content itself.
Metadata (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Metadata (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, Google's idea is to use the closed-caption feed text for tagging, so nobody has to watch anything. IMHO, this is a brilliant strategy because (obviously) closed-captioning by its natuire offers high correlation between the text and images in any given section of video.
Parent
Great idea! (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm really looking forward to this.
I'm using Google's image-search very often (and love it!) and I could really use video clip-search.
However, considering how well many sites hide the actual video clips (and I'm not talking about porn), I guess Google might face strong resistance from content providers (wasn't there last week a story about a porn website sueing Google over image-search?)
Retroactive recopyright (Score:3, Insightful)
we all love google (Score:2, Funny)
And to make money for Google.... (Score:3, Funny)
Seaching is not the same as web searching (Score:3, Insightful)
Searching for documents on your computer is different. People aren't hotlinking your documents. The computer has to try and summerize that 20 page report or just do a straight text match web search. (Maybe using some semantic tricks.) To do this right is really hard. I worked for a start up that used Ontology based searching, trying to understand the text and match it to search criteria. It kinda worked sometimes which isn't nearly good enough.
I've been tagging my stills. I have little illusion that anything but me typing in descriptions into the metadata files [plocp.com] which are kinda like xml
The only way this video might work is that video is sent in "packages" ie lots of video to edit down and a story. Close captioning would be usefull as well. Indexing on the text part and matching the video would be a great and very useful thing to these companies.
Video search? (Score:5, Informative)
I already spend my time searching the TV... (Score:2)
... for something good to watch on all those channels I have. I suppose this could make me turn off the TV more quickly and pick up a good book instead.
I wonder how they'll make money on this? Maybe they'll do the picture-in-picture thing and show a relevant commercial while you're watching the video clip. (AdWords would work better, but you'd need to be able to click on links.)
Eric
View your browser's HTTP headers here [ericgiguere.com]
Searching for quotes (Score:2, Funny)
The future is soooo cool
In other news... (Score:2)
Google Search (Score:2)
Good TV shows: 12
Good TV shows that are legal: No results found
How about a Google TV Guide? (Score:3, Interesting)
On the subject of useful things for google - how about a currency converter? The convenience of being able to go to Google and type "$10 in £" rather than using XE.com [xe.com] would be pretty cool as well.
Existing products that index video. (Score:2)
Even though Google is big, they will have to do a lot to better this product (which is already quite a mature one used by many many large corporations).
I've used it long ago, and it is sweet!
Internet or television? (Score:2, Interesting)
Searching Clips (Score:3, Informative)
I worked on a project a couple of years ago with a product from a company called Virage [virage.com] which did this very thing (in fact, it looks like I'm still on their front page). It basically mapped clip timings to the transcript, and allowed searching through the transcript for a phrase, at which point the user could simply click and start the video from that point.
We used it to archive thousands of hours of public meetings, which became available for search about an hour after the meeting was finished. When I did the training at their facility I know they had contracts with lots of major broadcasters, including MLB.
One interesting thing about their software was the clip plugins which allowed you to automatically create clips based on keywords in the transcript (or the speech-to-text), movements, or even facial recognition.
I could easily see this happening for all kinds of televised programs and, let me tell you, is really frickin cool.
Re:Searching Clips (Score:2)
I also worked with Virage for archiving our video broadcasts. We used to create the archived clips by hand, slicing and dicing the files up. Virage saved our guys a lot of time and made our site a lot more functional.
Did you use the Perl interface? I ended up writing a Java based package that made XML calls to their server. At the time it was experimental, but keeping it all running under weblogic was nice.
I was very happy with Virage, and thought the same thing when I saw this article. Wonder if
TV 0, Radio 1 (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a weird way to describe what Google does... if they bring anything to the Web, it's the Web itself!
But here's the best part of the entire article, IMHO:
Google has been working with National Public Radio and others to index transcripts of audio already on the Internet so that clips can be searchable from its news search engine.
Personally, I would use the video search engine only occasionally... but there is an unbelievable amount of high-quality content that NPR provides on its website, going back years -- interviews, shows, projects, special reports, hell, even Car Talk. The radio thing is a real gem, and I can't wait to use it.
Like VHS and Betamax (Score:2)
In all seriousness - Microsoft and Yahoo and Google are out in some ner territory, Verity have video searching, currently google pulls media out of matching pages, and lists them that way (also alt/title text).
Video is a whole other kettle of old korean people.
Already done and functional...TVeyes (Score:3, Informative)
Here's an excerpt from their front page: You used to be able to sign up for a free trial (now you have to e-mail them) but the top-10 "search" words for TV were interesting. Osama Bin-Laden always held the #1 spot, and Martha Stewart was popular too.
-Fred
Digital Archives in Chaos? (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't agree that the digital archives of any major network are in such a state that finding a clip can be described in terms of needle and haystack.
From my work with the BBC, on a project known as Motion Gallery [bbcmotiongallery.com] I'd say that video footage already in a digital format is extensively catalogued and mapped to keyword architecture.
I am also aware of at least 4 other digital archive projects within the BBC. Some of these cover the digital storage of newly filmed material, others like Creative Archive [bbc.co.uk] are relevant to making historical footage available online.
The needle in a haystack metaphor is really only relevant to archive materials that are not digital and have been stored on tape or film. Then there is an issue around the cataloguing and ease of searching such material. Even so, the BBC has it's own search system known as Infax [bbc.co.uk]. Other broadcasters, such as ITN, have already made their text based archive search [itnarchive.com] available on the Internet.
I think Google can certainly bring some interesting technology and approaches to searching video archive content. This could be in the area of better indexing for existing digital archive footage, or perhaps a search aggregation of text based archive systems in much the same way they provide an image search service now.
Can Google overcome the problem of poorly catalogued tape based media archives? In short no. They could however assist organisations to effectively structure their keyword hierachies when migrating to a digital video format.
MPEG-7 is supposed to enable this (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if the frameworks that these guys are developing are within the standard, or if they're going on their own to do this to sidestep patent licensing obligations?
Re:MPEG-7 is supposed to enable this (Score:3, Interesting)
But what is by any means needed to be able to automatically index the hundreds of thousands of videos out there and generate the meta-data with which to fill in the provided framework, so that in future queries can be performed.
One might think indexing is an easy task but it isn't. We are also working on different kinds of indexing techniques which can provide many ways
BBC already have this internally (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, ALL. Even the old stuff - 1870s, IIRC.
They had a big (stonking) database which held the metadata (right down to the equivalent of "This image clip is of Princess Diana wearing a blue dress and kissing a baby"), which was extracted and put into a proper document search engine.
A web front-end was created that performed used the document search engine to get a list of results, then did a lookup to the original database to get the reference for the video clip in question.
Said reference telling you where on which shelf of which row of which large shed to go and look for the video tape/film reel/wax cylinder that contains the clip in question.
Darn good system, reasonably good performance, sucky technology (java applet using CORBA to connect to Java server, HTTP to connect to document search engine, JDBC to connect to original data source).
How do I know this? I wrote the darn thing..
Of course, it'll be obsolete and replaced by now.
I hope.
~cederic
Re:Why do I have this vision .. (Score:2)