Google Moves Into Video 158
prostoalex writes "Google will start indexing previously aired content from ABC, PBS, Fox News and C-SPAN and offer it as part of its Web search. No fancy speech-to-text recognition, just the closed captioning provided by the television networks, and no direct links to videocontent either." Right now, most of the channels are SF Bay area stations, but obviously more will be coming along. I saw a demo of this about six months or so ago - it's pretty cool, and interesting to see how far it has come.
Not as good as it sounds (Score:5, Interesting)
Search engine analyst Charlene Li of Forrester Research said Google's latest innovation is likely to disappoint many people because it doesn't provide a direct link to watch the previously broadcast programming.
Google instead is displaying up to five still video images from the indexed television programs, as well as snippets from the show's narrative. The search results also will provide a breakdown on when the program aired and when an episode is scheduled to be repeated. Local programming information will be available for those who provide a ZIP code.
Great for torrenting (Score:1, Interesting)
Blinx.com (Score:4, Interesting)
This apparently only applies to video content available on the web, but I guess it could potentially be done with TV content as well. It seems to me like this -- if it works -- is one step ahead of Google's approach.
ahhhh (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd say this is Jon Stewart's new homepage
Re:Not as good as it sounds (Score:5, Interesting)
Hey, even that is an great service. Of course, the closed captioning is rarely very good. I never understand how, on a show that was produced weeks before it was aired, the captions are often messed up, or missing key words. Captions (also on DVD subtitles) seem to be shorthand summaries of what was said, when it's usually possible for them to be exact transcripts.
Sometimes it's not a big deal, but sometimes they miss an important point or nuance.
What'd be great, though, is real honest-to-god searching of the audio. I've seen demos where you can literally type in "helicopter," and you'll get hotlinks to the exact times in the video wherever that word was said. It's fscking amazing. Not sure it's a publicly available technology yet, tho...but the capability is definitely out there, and I'm sure we're not the only people playing with this.
Re:Not as good as it sounds (Score:3, Interesting)
Also not as good as it sounds, apparently "the world" only extends to a few of the major US TV networks.
BBC already has video online, and they add subtitles to all content broadcast on BBC1 and BBC2, so it should have been easy to include them in the test. Given BBC's attitude towards the internet and making information freely available compared with most commercial broadcasters, they probably would have bent over backwards to help Google with this.
Needs tweaking (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not as good as it sounds (Score:3, Interesting)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and
Summary : Exiled Director General of the BBC planned to open the whole BBC archive online.
Makes me think. Did he resign over the Hutton enquiry , or was he pushed out by Murdochs lobbying. Similar timescale.
I mean, who would watch SKY if you could go online and watch anything the BBC ever produced. OK, almost. BBC don't own the Simpsons. But i bet Discovery would be short a few vieiwers . . anyhow, Spaghetti all round. .
Re:When I can Google.... (Score:2, Interesting)
And there is where Google will get shivved.
I used to manage the Discovery Channel Canada's web site at a time when we were transforming the site from an online science news magazine to a video-on-demand supplier of Discovery Channel Canada material. One of the things a few of us were interested in doing was offering up transcripts of aired programs. Doing it was simple, even then, since most TV tuner cards were capable of grabbing the captioning info from a vertical interval and dumping it to a text file. The main problem, I thought, was that the material was always ALL CAPS and chock-a-block with seplling mistaks (in my own opinion, I thought that after the show had aired, the captions were actually useless for anything more than internal archival purposes). The real problem, though, was that often (really often), we didn't actually own the copyright.
Commonly, an outside company produces a show for a broadcaster. Once the show has aired, they are free to sell it to other broadcasters in other regions. So they are particularly feverish about protecting their material from the Internet. I mean, why would a broadcaster in Germany want to buy a television program translated into German if its English transcripts were available on the Internet? Well, I thought that was a garbage argument, but the lawyers didn't. In fact, the supply contracts with outside show producers were so fanatically exact, that using the captions for anyone other than the hard of hearing was simple out of the question.
So if the broadcaster can't use that material, what makes Google think they can?
Besides, do you think for one moment that Fox will let anyone use stills and complete transcripts of The Simpsons? Not in a million years, man.
I see busy days ahead for http://chillingeffects.org/ [chillingeffects.org].
Things that will happen before it's a real service (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Facial recognition will be around. It already exists, several companies have offered such products for video, mainly for the purpose of the entertainment industry.
2. Speech Recognition for indexing.
I've got a feeling right now they are just trying to see what type of reaction 'video' gets. Just to guage the interest.
It's not bad already, it's pretty cool. But I'm betting this is only the beginning.
It is possible for them to do more than one thing (Score:4, Interesting)
Google employees get to spend a day a week working on a project that interests them - good for employee morale, and some of these pet projects have turned out very useful indeed.
*yes, I know some of these were originally purchases.
Re:Not as good as it sounds (Score:3, Interesting)
Most people don't realize that captioning is done in near-real-time, and considering that, the captioners do an AMAzing job, you should watch them in action.
Neat (Score:3, Interesting)
Google instead is displaying up to five still video images from the indexed television programs, as well as snippets from the show's narrative. The search results also will provide a breakdown on when the program aired and when an episode is scheduled to be repeated. Local programming information will be available for those who provide a ZIP code.
I think Google is aiming to stay within fair-use boundaries. (And also avoiding taking on a needless bandwidth burden serving video).
It would be possible for people to use "Google Video Search" to identify interesting TV content outside their local area, then request snippets a P2P manner from users whose computers were in the local area of the broadcast.
What are the fair-use guidelines for recording and sharing of free-to-air TV content, can someone say?
TiVO got US FCC permission for:
its customers [to] receive digital broadcasts and share them with up to 10 other TiVo units that share the same customer account.
However, if 10 TiVOs "share a customer account", they belong to the same person (or to his family).
Is sharing, say, a 5 minute clip of a news broadcast between different computers belonging to different people allowed?
Re:great.. just great (Score:3, Interesting)
Given he's made so many outrageous (and I believe false and mendacious statements) this is such a bizarre thing to pick on.
Yahoo and google 2 different approaches?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Compare the results of these two searches for the daily show
YAHOO [yahoo.com]
GOOGLE [google.com]
Surprisingly GOOGLE doesnt actually show the daily show just programs that mention it.