TV Guide owner, Gemstar which makes its money out of offering EPG technology and program data to TV services, said this week it was going to try to offer video search services to navigate TV programming when it was delivered over the internet.
It will launch a test version next month of a search engine that will only index clips and full episodes of TV shows which are on the internet and which will ignore any other video. It hopes to launch the completed service in September.
To a certain extent this is dumb. We understand the thinking, that existing TV content is the ‘real’ content that people want to watch whether on the internet or the TV, but this approach means that any new content that is thrown up by the internet, or even if it is made for TV, but cannot find a home there, will not be indexed. So in a way this service will miss out on a whole new paradigm of content if it isn’t careful.
It doesn’t have to index user generated content, but it could at least highlight every piece of quality video out there. At present it will only look on around 60 web sites from major networks and video portals such as AOL and Google.
The TV Guide video search technology looks for metadata surrounding a video, and will measure this against its existing database of video to establish what the video is. Results will be grouped by actors, directors, the network is first ran on and by genre. Other video search engines work by using closed captioning, surrounding web data and the dialogue in the video which is converted using voice recognition.