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 Content has been archived since December, 2004, and includes a sampling of broadcasts from ABC, PBS, C-SPAN, C-SPAN2, NBC, and FOX News.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.