thoughts on technology and culture, politics, and information design
Sunday, February 06, 2005
coming soon - search television by content
Generally, when something is done for "accessibility" reasons, the benefits end up being wide-reaching. In the physical world, automatic door openers are certainly helpful for someone using a wheelchair, but also useful for people carrying groceries. Curb cuts are great for someone pushing a stroller or riding a skateboard.
In the world of information technology, similar examples are often seen. Web sites with ALT tags are more effectively indexed by search engines. Multimedia files that include captions, either embedded (quicktime) or in an associated XML file (SMIL or SAMI) can be indexed, and captions associated with a specific time-code in a video file.
Google now has a beta site that lets you search a host of recently aired television shows by content. Content has been archived since December, 2004, and includes a sampling of broadcasts from ABC, PBS, C-SPAN, C-SPAN2, NBC, and FOX News. Hopefully additional stations will be added. It is conceivable that basically all televised content subject to FCC regulations will be searchable as soon as indexed within the next few years, since FCC regulations require the captioning of virtually all "new content" by January 1, 2006. Online multimedia may come along more slowly, though captioning software such as MagPIE (free) and Hi-Caption (commercial) is available now.
From playing around with the beta, it looks like Google would like to be able to show video snippets associated with the captions. I imagine that the licensing issues are not simple for Google to work out, but I look forward to seeing this beta expand.
Thursday, February 03, 2005
music rental?
Napster today announced an alternative model for the use of digital music. Rental.
For $14.95 a month, you can download and listen to an unlimited amount of music, on a variety of devices (but not the market leading iPod). I support efforts towards giving consumers more ways to use digital music, and think this model will be useful to some, but will fail to attract a huge following. Here are some reasons why:
By not supporting the iPod, the majority of consumers who listen to music on a portable digital player are required to purchase a new device...not a small investment.
Users are required to have Windows 2000 or XP and use Windows Media Player. I have both a mac and a PC, but use my Macintosh to purchase music and sync with my iPod.
I think that only "hardcore" music listeners are going to be willing to pay a repeating monthly fee in order to access a music collection. I probably spent 40 or 50 dollars on iTunes music purchases in 2004. Based upon my pattern of "music consumption," a rental model with a monthly fee is too expensive for me.
I have bought several albums on iTunes, and have burned all of them to CD to listen to in the car and on my home stereo. Much of the utility of owning a song lies in flexible use, which the rental model does not provide.
What I can see doing is paying $14.95 one-time to fill up my portable device with music that expires after 30 days. This would give me a mechanism to explore a variety of new music without a significant investment. I could then choose to buy individuals albums/songs that I liked. I'm not sure how easy it is to subscribe/unsubscribe to the service of if there is any sort of minimum time frame involved with a subscription, but I think these questions may have a bearing on the success of this service.