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Google Businesses The Internet

Coming soon: Google TV? 193

Posted by CmdrTaco 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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Coming soon: Google TV? More

Coming soon: Google TV?

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  • yay (Score:4, Funny)

    by unknown51a ( 741797 ) on Tuesday November 30, 2004 @09:40AM (#10952353) Homepage
    great... more reasons to sit in front of a pc

  • Cool (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 30, 2004 @09:40AM (#10952358)
    Now I won't have to search for the remote

  • I'm feeling lucky (Score:5, Funny)

    by yahyamf ( 751776 ) * on Tuesday November 30, 2004 @09:41AM (#10952362)
    Hmm, now where can I get a remote with an "I'm feeling lucky" button? In Korea maybe?
  • This is a chance for Google to do something truly cool in device connectivity. Even the possibility of a Google TV-Gmail-Google Desktop Search-Google Search connectivity would send their share prices soaring.
    People are realizing (yahoo, MSN) that large and bloated is not the way to go.

  • This is great! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by delta_avi_delta ( 813412 ) <dave...murphy@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday November 30, 2004 @09:41AM (#10952367)
    If I'm not mistaken, vast quantities of tv archive, much of it from the "golden age" when people expected their educational programs to be presided over by professors, is in the public domain. I'd love to be able to dig up some early BBC2.

    • Re:This is great! (Score:2, Informative)

      by slaad ( 589282 )
      If I'm not mistaken, vast quantities of tv archive, much of it from the "golden age" when people expected their educational programs to be presided over by professors, is in the public domain. I'd love to be able to dig up some early BBC2.

      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)

      by Zork the Almighty ( 599344 ) on Tuesday November 30, 2004 @09:45AM (#10952410) Journal
      You are mistaken. In the United States, the vast majority of recorded works remain under copyright. It does not matter that nobody can contact the rightsholders to get permission, you can not use it. Thank Disney / Universal / Viacom / Time Warner / Fox for that one. The reality is that big media does not want to compete with the public domain.

    • Re:This is great! (Score:4, Informative)

      by rdc_uk ( 792215 ) on Tuesday November 30, 2004 @09:50AM (#10952465)
      A large proportion of the BBC's and a fair proportion of Channel 4's current history educational programming is presented by real academics. Not necessarily "professors" (which is a specific academic-arena job, not entirely related to qualifications), but real academics.

      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)
      • IIRC, even the "what the victorians did for us" guy, despite his silly costumes etc, is a pretty highly qualified man...

        Adam Hart-Davies - the man. Bristol's most famous son. Just ahead of Cary Grant.

    • I'd love to be able to dig up some early BBC2.

      Yes, I've really missed my weekend Welsh lessons...

    • If I'm not mistaken, vast quantities of tv archive, much of it from the "golden age" when people expected their educational programs to be presided over by professors, are going to be put online for free through the BBC's Creative Archive [bbc.co.uk]. I'm sure you'll be able to dig up some early BBC2 there.

      Assuming you've paid your UK TV license fee of course. :)
      • The UK TV License isn't such a bad idea. The BBC is publicly funded. If you have a TV, then they charge you because you have access to the channel. Better then in Canada where they charge you in Taxes for the CBC, even if you don't own a TV. I mean, they really should only be charging you if you watch the channel. But that would require that they monitor what you watch. Which i'm sure nobody wants.

  • The saddest thing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Zork the Almighty ( 599344 ) on Tuesday November 30, 2004 @09:41AM (#10952368) Journal
    Yeah, but just try getting at that content. It will be like scholarly journals. Anyone can search and find anything, but then you have to mortgage your house for an annual subscription to view the content. The promise of a true digital library is a long way off, so long as we have insane copyright laws.
    • Copyright laws result in more and better art. Feature film production is one of the riskiest financial ventures that one can undertake because more than 80% of produced feature films lose money. Film producers make up for that with the few that do turn a profit. Copyright laws help protect these rare profits so the film producers can survive and produce more of their art. Art is good for the soul of man, but if you take away the reward then you'll see the risk takers fade away.
      • I'm not arguing against copyright laws in general, but I think our current laws are very bad. Automatic copyright is one problem. It creates a presumption of legal hassles for using anything. And the fact that copyrights no longer need to be registered and renewed creates another problem, orphaned works. Nobody can track down who owns a movie, so the original rots in a movie studio vault. Works will be lost to history because of our own stupidity. My point is not that copyrights shouldn't exist at all


      • 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
      • Do you really believe this MPAA company line? If 80 percent of films LOST MONEY, even the 1 in 5 film that was a monster hit wouldn't be able to pick up the slack. Don't think I'm being a spin doctor file sharer, either. Like the RIAA, these people have no qualms about spinning the books to make it LOOK like they're bleeding money when they're really racking it in. They do this primarily for two reasons: 1) tax breaks, 2) to keep the royalty money away from those who only see them once the movie "evens."
    • Unless you go to the library. For every time some sort of registration has blocked me from reading something, I've always been able to go to the public or university library to get around it. If you're at a library, that library usually has all the subscriptions already. And since being there seems to mean that you're doing something for academics its all good.

      The digital library exists. But to get access you have to go to the paper library.
      • Or be a professor or student at a university. As a Clemson University grad student, there are thousands of journals that I can easily access from pretty much anywhere in the world (just give me net access).

        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.
      • The digital library exists. But to get access you have to go to the paper library.

        Why should that be the case ?

  • Coupled with a pay per view model... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jarich ( 733129 ) on Tuesday November 30, 2004 @09:42AM (#10952382) Homepage Journal
    If Google can setup the search with a pay per view service on TV shows, this could put a dent in the P2P scene.

    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)

      by savagedome ( 742194 ) on Tuesday November 30, 2004 @09:45AM (#10952407)
      search with a pay per view service on TV shows

      I use http://www.tvtorrents.net/ [tvtorrents.net] to catch up on my tv
      • I use http://www.tvtorrents.net/ to catch up on my tv

        I was envisioning a legal service. ;)

        • I was envisioning something to get past Miami's [muohio.edu] fascist device [packeteer.com]
        • Don't know about legal, but if you pay for cable/satellite TV, as far as I'm concerned, you're in the moral clear in downloading episodes you've missed of shows you watch (provided you do indeed have the channels those shows are broadcast on as part of your paid package).

          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

          • I agree, in principle.
            However, the biggest problem with using BitTorrent to download something is that you end up sending it to people - people who may not have the legal right to download it.
            Copyright law doesn't prohibit downloading - it prohibits unauthorized redistribution and duplication, both of which BitTorrent accomplishes.

            I have some back episodes of Good Eats I missed that I'd like to watch (I do get Food Network), and I would like to check out Lost, but I don't feel like running the legal risk.
    • The problem is, instead of doing it for a reasonable cost, like 25 or 50 cents, any company will try to gorge consumers and will charge $1.99 thereby removing any chance of it lowering p2p traffic.

    • Imagine being able to look up an old Seinfeld, and then watch it for fifty cents.

      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

      • 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?

        While the rest of those shows are utter dreck, Seinfeld is probably the only sitcom on television to have truly intelligent jokes and actually remain entertaining to watch. Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld are comedic geniuses. I'm sorry you don't appreciate their humor.
    • The problem is that they'd probably charge $5 to view it, or force you to buy sets. And since copyright is so strict there isn't any opportunity for a competitor to set up a similar service with the same content.
  • Of a WebTV competitor? Everyone remember the old WebTVs that Microsoft had?

  • I've tested the beta... (Score:5, Funny)

    by oexeo ( 816786 ) on Tuesday November 30, 2004 @09:44AM (#10952399)
    Google TV Search: Something actually worth watching

    No results found

    Suggestions:
    - Try lowering your standards to an obscene level

  • "show_me_janets_breast_which_justin_saw"...

  • More like TV Guide (Score:5, Informative)

    by GillBates0 ( 664202 ) on Tuesday November 30, 2004 @09:45AM (#10952406) Homepage Journal
    They're not talking about hosting video...they're just talking about making online video content more searchable/accessible.

    Sounds more like TV Guide, rather than content itself.

  • Metadata (Score:2, Interesting)

    by echocharlie ( 715022 )
    TV Guide info and synopsis information is already available. Even a basic search using this information would be very useful to many people. Google engineers may want to add information to their database, but that would require actually wading through millions of hours of bad television. I volunteer to watch all the anime. The good:bad ratio there is significantly better.

    • Re:Metadata (Score:4, Informative)

      by saddino ( 183491 ) on Tuesday November 30, 2004 @09:48AM (#10952443)
      Google engineers may want to add information to their database, but that would require actually wading through millions of hours of bad television.

      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.

  • Great idea! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by koi88 ( 640490 ) on Tuesday November 30, 2004 @09:46AM (#10952417)

    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)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Tuesday November 30, 2004 @09:46AM (#10952418) Homepage Journal
    Once we can search old TV content, it will become much more valuable. Even shows whose copyrights expired before the era of indefinite extensions will be valuable "property", though their public domain status means they have no "owner". So Congress will create owners, by retroactively extending copyrights on that content to current corporations.
    • Not paranoid enough. Which corporations would get what? Too complicated. And why bother with a middleman? The government will simple claim the copyrights for itself.

      (I suppose there's a slim chance it'd go public domain, but since that seems to be Undemocratic or something...)
  • 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

    Like you can count on networks to embrace new useful technology [latimes.com]...
  • when will adult-movies.google.com be available?

  • And to make money for Google.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Shnizzzle ( 652228 ) on Tuesday November 30, 2004 @09:49AM (#10952450)
    implement targeted commericals? Still, it would be better than seeing tampon and herpes medication ads (for me at least).

  • Seaching is not the same as web searching (Score:3, Insightful)

    by acomj ( 20611 ) on Tuesday November 30, 2004 @09:49AM (#10952453) Homepage
    The one thing google does really well is harness the "collective intelligence" of the web. Basically it assumes that people creating the web pages and links by hand have some skill and will only link to "reputable" sites. For the most part this works pretty well, although I've been pointed to excellent technicall references that google hasn't found.

    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 ,will work. Searching through them can be made better than just a text match.

    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.
    • 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.

      What was their name, and did they use "brown bear" as a test search? I think my Data Structures & Algorithms teacher might have worked there too.

  • Video search? (Score:5, Informative)

    by barcodez ( 580516 ) on Tuesday November 30, 2004 @09:50AM (#10952454)
    What you mean like this [alltheweb.com]?

  • ... 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]

  • The coolest thing would be if you search for a quote you rememebered from an old simpsons episode, but could not rememeber which one. video.google.com, "I'm Feeling Lucky" and after a second it starts streaming that episode.

    The future is soooo cool :-)
  • OMG, this is going to revolutionize pr0n!
  • Google recently released the top 10 most searched terms for its new Digital Video search service. However, this list cannot be printed here as all terms on the list are inappropriate for this family oriented news service...

  • TV shows: 1,234,567
    Good TV shows: 12
    Good TV shows that are legal: No results found

  • How about a Google TV Guide? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JaF893 ( 745419 ) on Tuesday November 30, 2004 @09:56AM (#10952514) Journal
    It would be really cool if google made a TV guide search. For example, if I could go to Google UK and type "BBC1 NOW" - google would tell me what was on BBC1 at the moment. It would be even better if it allowed to specifiy a date and time eg "BBC1 24/12/04 22:00". Now that would be really useful:)

    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.
    • What would be really cool would be a TV schedule alert. Suppose I really want to see something which gets shown once every couple of years, or am a fan of a particular actor. If I could set up alerts so that as soon as something matching the title of what I want, or an entry for my fave hollywood chick is added to the schedule, I get a message in my Gmail account telling me not to make any plans next Thursday.

      Also... will it look at my contacts list in Gmail for fellow gmail users and tell me things lik
  • Will Gooogle become LCARS of Star Trek
  • A product called Retrievalware [convera.com] from a company called Convera [convera.com] does this nicely [convera.com] already.

    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)

    by yahyamf ( 751776 ) *
    I'm a little concerned about the future very high speed Internet being used just like television by the masses. The internet has so much more potential for education and free uncensored flow of information, but developments like these might make a lot of people use the the net only as another way to watch TV. That is a smarter way to make them dumber.
  • At least the parent company Overture, AlltheWeb seems to be their testing grounds, more specifically their video search [alltheweb.com].
  • Man, if they thought they got a lot of lawsuits from the image archives, wait till the media giants see this one. Websites with copyrighted video will invariably be linked and the C&D letters will invariably begin flying.

    The good news is that Google is invariably prepared for this...I applaud their efforts!

  • Searching Clips (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anml4ixoye ( 264762 ) on Tuesday November 30, 2004 @09:57AM (#10952532) Homepage

    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.

    • Hi!

      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
      • I believe Autonomy has already acquired Virage [com.com].

      • Did you use the Perl interface?

        Yep, sure did! Did a whole bunch of Javascript hacks to it too. I toyed with doing XML calls to the server using Perl and Cold Fusion, but by that point we had it up and running and didn't want to mess with it anymore.

        A poster already replied, but Autonomy did indeed buy Virage. My understanding was that the piece we were playing with was the public piece, but they had something else that was for government use only. Probably related to the facial recognition technologies.

  • TV 0, Radio 1 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mogrify ( 828588 ) on Tuesday November 30, 2004 @09:57AM (#10952534) Homepage
    Google's trying to bring TV to the Web the same way they're bringing books to the Web

    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.
  • Whoever brings good porn results to the search for video will rule.

    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.
  • In what way is this different from the already existing Archive.org Moving Image Archive [archive.org]? Is Google going to host the movies too, or will they just link to a 3rd party VoD (Video on Demand) provider (DRM comes to mind...)?

  • Already done and functional...TVeyes (Score:3, Informative)

    by mecredis ( 121637 ) * on Tuesday November 30, 2004 @10:08AM (#10952617) Homepage
    Not sure what the patent situation is for this technology, but a small company TVEyes (full disclosure: I used to be an intern there) has already done this. Check out their website here [tveyes.com].

    Here's an excerpt from their front page:
    TVEyes makes Radio & TV searchable by keyword, phrase or topic - just as you would use a search engine for text. With a fast growing network of stations monitored worldwide, TVEyes provides the technology and the content.
    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
  • To build the service, the company is recording live TV shows and indexing the related closed-caption text of the programming. It uses the text to identify themes, concepts and relevant keywords for video so they can be triggers for searching.

    Oh great, so apologies for all deaf/hard of hearing or people looking at captions for translations, as execs play SPAM like phrases into programming, as this gets too obvious, whole scripts will be edited:

    Have you seen Friends series 15? The one with the cheap pharma
  • All we really want is an updated image index instead of the current perhistoric one.
  • It's called Virage Video Logger. Large companies like ABC have used this forever. Search through news , tv shows, etc... http://www.virage.com/ [virage.com]
    • Yes, but AFAIK Virage (and eMotion [emotion.com] and other asset management systems that support video) require manually tagging of video, especially when it is archived from tape.

      Google proposes using the closed caption text already synced in broadcast television (and feature films) to use as a temporal keyword mapping.

      As others have pointed out, when it comes to un-captioned video, Google is in the same boat as Virage and the others. That's why Google is primarily interested in broadcast TV and film. In general, Go

  • Digital Archives in Chaos? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PhillC ( 84728 ) on Tuesday November 30, 2004 @10:50AM (#10953026) Homepage Journal
    ...reveal needles of video clips from within the haystack archives of major network TV shows.

    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.

    • Just a thought. Google is good at bringing order to vast amount of web data, these comprise not only text, but also images and non web formats like pdf and .doc etc.

      SO what if they built a system where a all you need to do is insert tapes and it would rip the video and sound on the tape, run somesort of OCR and speech recognition on it then discard (or encode and save in a low quality preview) the ripped video data but retained the results of the OCR and sound recognition.

      The later processing of that 'rev
  • www.google.tv [google.tv] is registered and goes to the regular Google page. Rememeber how they denied gbrowser.com meant anything.

  • Easy (Score:2)

    by mattr ( 78516 )
    Maybe they should just hire the guys who did it wonderfully at Carnegie Mellon 5+ years ago. On the other hand, maybe they have.
  • It knows when the commercials are, and you have to watch them.

  • MPEG-7 is supposed to enable this (Score:3, Interesting)

    by StandardCell ( 589682 ) on Tuesday November 30, 2004 @11:35AM (#10953460)
    If you read the MPEG-7 proposals [chiariglione.org], you'll find that there are provisions for searching based on varying granularities of characteristics of the video and audio both in metadata and within the clips themselves.

    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?
    • Yes, you're right. The XML-like meta-data possibilties of MPEG7 provide a framework for this kind of application - for this very purpose.

      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
  • And here we get a glimpse of the future. So far Suprnova and the like have risen to the top for television shows and the like because they're the only ones who don't care about the legal repurcussions, and as of now they have the best organization system for it.

    It will be really interesting to see if Google can come along and topple them. I think it would require to remain even more neutral and not filter any of the content on there. If they can do that, I'm sure Google's superior experience and technolo

  • at http://google.tv
    Yes, this is a joke
  • Let me speculate....
    Google will create an appliance akeen to Tivo. It will have a PILE of disk space and allow you to record EVERYTHING ALL the time. In other words, you won't have to instruct your device to record certain programs, it will have enough memory to save it all. You will then be expected to come home, turn into a couch potatoe, but instead of rewind/forward and such functions, there will be search, label, recommend, archive, share with friends, etc. They'll hook it up to your desktop/laptop

  • BBC already have this internally (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Cederic ( 9623 ) on Tuesday November 30, 2004 @01:42PM (#10954751) Journal
    In 1999 a system went live at the BBC that allowed them to search metadata on all their video archives.

    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

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