Jain: In the last two months media has been talking a lot about video
search. Video search is always considered in the context of TV
programs. Since TV and Movies have become such an important part of
the modern society, even in developing countries, media finds video
search to be very attractive. Lately there have been several articles
about Blinkx (www.blinkx.tv or www.blinkx.com) and about Yahoo. I
believe that Bradley Horowitz was quoted about Yahoo plans in media
search where they talked about media RSS. I played with both Yahoo and
Blinkx for their video search. Yahoo seems to rely more on the name of
the video file and its page. Blinkx seems to be based on the text
associated with audio or video. Like Streamsage, they may be using
natural language based approaches to the text associated with audio and
video files. Of course the text is obtained by applying Automatic
Speech Recognition (ASR) techniques. Virage (or Autonomy) also uses a
similar approach. As we discussed, this may be a good start to deal
with media (audio and video) from programs that are produced in well
controlled environment such that ASR techniques are effective in
converting speech to text. It is also possible to use Closed Captions
whenever available. A good volume of TV content, particularly related
to News, falls in this class.