<$BlogRSDUrl$> Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Internet Happenings, Events and Sources


Sunday, December 19, 2004  

The Search Is On For Digital Video
http://news.com.com/Striking+up+digital+video+search/2100-1032_3-5466491.html

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all are quietly developing new search technology for ferreting out snippets of digital video from the vast archives of television programming. "Google's trying to bring TV to the Web the same way they're bringing books to the Web," says one media executive. And while Google's effort is perhaps the most ambitious, Microsoft has its sights set on the interactive TV market for cable providers and Yahoo is planning to debut a multimedia search engine and is working with Web entertainment and news aggregators to index video clips already online. The Internet's evolution into a viable entertainment platform will open up vast new video libraries that will require new search technology to organize and make content relevant to viewers, just as search engines have done for the billions of pages on the Web. The task is daunting -- while users can generally discern very quickly if a Web search result is what they're looking for, each video clip could take from 15 seconds to several minutes to peruse. To tackle the problem, Google 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 to use for later searching. Each result will appear in a thumbnail picture accompanied by some captioning text. "The business models are too soon to tell, but everyone is interested," says one person close to the deal. "First, the meetings are about, 'Don't sue us for nicking your closed captioning,' and then it's the commercial possibilities."

posted by Marcus Zillman | 4:15 AM
archives
subject tracers™