There is plenty of speculation about the future of online video search.Traditionally, the Internet has been a text-based resource.But with the growth of broadband, multimedia content is now one of the fastest growing areas online. With a surging demand for rich media content, why is it that video search continues to remain the elusive killer application?
To date, major search engines still rely on text-based titles, tags, and metadata for searching multimedia content. But the race for true video search is coming, and the winners will be taking home a huge payoff in advertising dollars.
Searching for video today reminds me of the clumsy text search days of the early 90s. The fact is that converting video into a truly searchable format is not easy, consistent, or cheap to carry out. There are noble attempts to develop true video search with companies like TVEyes and Nexidia. But even they understand the limitations of video search today.
Video is far more complicated to index then text. With mixed audio, subject gestures, and inflections, and even visual events or demonstrations that suppress human scripts, the fact is indexing video for accurate searching is still in need of some breakthrough technologies. Now, speech recognition software is being developed that can actually associate audio words and visual stills with auto-generated keywords. But the technology is still inconsistent and has yet to be monetized effectively.
Why the push for true video search? First, trends are proving that the growth of advertising on rich media sites is outpacing traditional online advertising. Additionally, matching targeted ads to video content is clearly a prize worth considering. Second, YouTube Inc. will be a major force behind the drive towards true video search. Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) will never recoup its billion-dollar investment in YouTube unless it integrates the site with its search technology and search-based advertising program.
It’s one thing to have advertisers position themselves on high-traffic video sites, but it’s more effective to integrate advertising into relevant video content. For example, a video showing some people taking a trip to California’s Napa valley could be indexed and connected with advertising for local wineries, lodging, and other travel packages that dynamically appear when the video content exhibits that related content. This technology is being developed and tested now. We may see some very large license deals in the near future to spread these search applications across multiple platforms.
Major search engines have yet to provide breakthrough tools for video search. But with millions of videos being uploaded each week, the pressure and opportunity to monetize true video search will force one of them to take the lead. An announcement from Google or Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) to leverage video search would spawn a new era in rich content delivery and the search-based revenue model.
Additionally, smaller players who have already made some headway in their own video search R&D efforts will also become drivers in the industry. Other online enterprises will be forced to follow their lead in order to integrate video search technology as part of a new competitive requirement.
The time for using enhanced search engines to get blended returns of text, audio, and video is not that far away. Companies that perfect, monetize, and distribute video search technology will be in the ultimate position for market growth. True video search will become another major step towards changing our digital landscape once again.
— Peter W. Bowman, Executive Vice President, Avericom
I didn't leave a 'comment'. I left a reply to yours.
Obvious items :
1. Videos are being indexed by manually entered tags now.
2. Different methods are being evaluated and developed for auto-indexing based on video content. ( http://demo.iupr.org/videotagging/youtube.pdf )
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When I read an article with a title like this, I expect something new, something more advanced, and something that actually tells me something I do not know.
Articles from 'Experts' should stop being just 'puff'. As commenters, you and I do not owe anything to the readers. The author does have editorial responsibility.
cloud9ine, thanks for checking the spelling for me. But if you don't really have anything to say apart from pointing out someone else's minor spelling mistake and saying someone else's article or comment is pointless, then it's best you don't say anything at all here. It's ok if you disagree or think you know better, but you should at least state your reasons or opinions on the actual topic being discussed here. If any comment is pointless here at all, it is your comment.
If I understand correctly, true video search is about indexing/searching video clips by some relevant keywords (but text-based nonetheless) that are auto-generated from their visual/audio content as opposed to manual keywording. If so, advance in image and speech recognition technologies may be the key to making true video search a reality. Though there has been a lot of development in this field, finding a practical way for computer software to make some sense of images (still or motion) and speeches, which are diverse in quality level (or noise level), and then produce accurate and relevant information out of them is still one of the most challenging engineering problems of our time.
I think true video search is a very interesting and nice concept. But given its complexity, I can't help but doubt that it's going to be technically and financially feasible in the near future. For instance, indexing video alone would require a huge data storage which would cost big time, and we might then start to realize perhaps the conventional video search isn't such a bad idea for what it can do with respect to the costs. Moreover, even if true video search indexing were possible, user input to the search would still be text-based, describing the video content being searched for (it would be interesting to be able to search with "keyimages" or "keyvideo" as input rather than "keywords").
Nevertheless, there's no question that true video search will be very useful if it actually works. And I agree that one of its important applications would be for content-matching ads. Besides, this technology would help Google/Yubetube a lot in dealing with the issues of filtering inappropriate or copyright-violated video content; at the moment, whatever they've been using as their filtering tool doesn't seem to work so well (see "YouTube's Filter Fails to Please - Forbes.com").
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