You may not realize it but there is a high-stakes technology arms race going on for control of your living room. Broadband growth has been the catalyst for the Internet as it has matured into more of an entertainment platform and video is playing a key role. Although it is becoming more routine for consumers to load audio, video and other data to our new network of Internet-connected gadgetry the key to success will be in finding relevant files.
The current technology used by today’s most popular search engines look for text like ".mov" or ".avi," and for keywords or links that might be in a document which give a sense of what type of content is there. Unfortunately this identifies only a small percentage of the video that’s currently available. Yahoo is trying to address the problem with new standards like “Media RSS” however how much can we rely on video providers to “submit” feeds. Google’s plan to search the closed-caption text is fine for present and future video but that is still text based and relies on a technology that is not used in many video productions. At best these approaches are workarounds and are only going to scratch the surface when it comes to identifying the millions of video files (growing exponentially) on the web.
AOL, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others have each been quietly developing new search tools for digital video. They all realize that searchable video is an extremely attractive new market and this new tool is extremely relevant to consumers hungry for multimedia. From a financial standpoint it also helps the companies appeal to brand advertisers, which spend about $60 billion annually on TV commercials. Recently I have taken notice of Truveo.com. They’re approach to video search is new an unique and its generating quite a buzz. It’s worth some research and perhaps a follow up post on this topic. I’d be interested in hearing your POV. Link: ZDNet Nov 29, 2005 – Striking up Video Internet Search, Previous SMM Posts: Oct 6, 2005 - Video over the Internet
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