Interviews with Digital Media Thought Leaders
Searching Internet Video for TV Viewing
Podcast Audio | Posted by Phil Leigh on December 22, 2008
Suranga Chandratillake
If you would like to learn about a video search engine that “looks” within the content of Internet video files, as opposed to relying upon metadata like conventional search engines, this Interview is for you.
Our guest today is Suranga Chandratillake, who is the CEO of Blinkx.com. Although the company is publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange, it is headquartered in San Francisco. Blinkx operates a search engine dedicated to Internet Video. Unlike conventional search engines that can only “look” at the metadata of such files (e.g. the tags and titles); Blinkx actually inspects the text and phonetics. The company also recently launched a website that functions as an aggregating directory for TV shows that are legitimately available on the Internet, typically for free viewing.
Recently I attached a laptop to my HD television in order to access Internet Video on the TV. The television is a 42-inch LCD flat panel and the laptop connects to it via an HDMI cable. Unlike earlier connection technologies, HDMI carries both video and sound and the video can be High Definition. The laptop connects to the Internet via dot-11g WiFi. From the sofa, I use a remote mouse and keyboard to surf the Web and watch Internet Videos on the TV is a lean-back viewing experience about 16-feet from the screen.
It is fun to get Internet Video on the TV. I have logged my activities in order to understand how they may be changing my viewing practices. One of the most obvious changes has been heavy reliance upon search engines to find video of interest. This primarily reflects the “Long-Tail” characteristics of the Net that send me in search of content that I could never otherwise find on conventional TV. Thus, I believe that future mass-market consumers will also want to optimize the search function when they get their TVs jacked-into the Internet.
While the Blinkx search engine crawls the Net effectively, it will identify a single video multiple times if the video is posted in several places. For example, Inside Digital Media video podcasts are often posted at YouTube, Veoh, and Blip.tv as well as our own website. Blinkx finds each posting and lists them separately. This might confuse the inexperienced user.
Categories: Podcast Audio
Tags: Blinkx.com, digital-media, Google, Internet-video, Video Search
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I just don,t understand how youtube are getting away with
basicly legalised copyright infringement this could destroy a lot of industries it seems the legal system are turning a blind eye to this especially when the technology exists to solve this
serious problem.
Ellen:
I presume that most of the professionally produced video that shows-up on YouTube is with the knowledge and, at least tacit, consent of the copyright holder. For example, I understand that YouTube responds promptly to take-down notices. Also, they have announced deals whereby old TV shows, like the original Stark Trek, are advertising-supported and explicit authorized by the copyright holder.