There is no question video online is booming , Level 3 says 50 per cent to 60 per cent of the traffic across its IP backbone is video source ( http://www.digitmag.co.uk )
Using tools such as Google and YouTube to search for content brings up a problem – the manner in which the video is actually stored and indexed.
The problem
Nearly all search engines rely upon a combination of meta data ( the descriptions given to the clip by the content producer ) and also user generated tags – both of which can be lacking in information or as demonstrated on Youtube, be completely irrelevant when performed by user tagging ( you can tag anything with Paris Hilton ).
Voice recognition
Technology however comes to the rescue here in the form of Blinkx, a new San Francisco based operation using voice recognition techniques to index and most importantly give context to words within the videos based on when and how they appear.
Blinkx works but trawling the net for video content ( they have over 7 million hours of footage ) and using its voice recognition technology is able to provide far better searching capabilities than existing technologies.
Key benefits of the system
- Pulls from many sources giving users a wider scope of search
- Controls the user “portal”
- Amazon hook-in for purchasing options
- IMDB for reviews and information
- Personal channel creation
- Does not host content ( presently ) so does not suffer from IP issues
Advantage
Controlling the search across many sources of information will give Blinkx an advantage over companies such as Joost and the BBC who are concentrating on providing ‘ channels ‘ through their content portals.
There is no doubt the future of the net is video , this is the first real offering which will see Google needing to play catch-up in the search
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