Search Your TV
from the interactive-TV-again dept
We were just talking about interactive TV, and how I thought any successful interactive TV offering would have some Tivo-like component involved, and here's an interesting article about a company called Dremedia in the UK. It seems they're working on a product that let's you search your TV for certain programs. For example, you could do a search for "Osama bin Laden" and find all the TV shows that are mentioning him. The system works by analyzing all the audio and determining what each show is about. If it works (big if), it could be a pretty cool feature to add to your Tivo. However, I'm not sure how many people would find it useful enough to pay any extra for it.
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Closed Caption Searching -- Already Around
This doesn't seem like biggest of deals to me. Similar "technology" already exists for closed-caption shows. And since the FCC mandates nearly all U.S. programming have closed captioning, it's as if the shows are already indexed.
And, back when ATI first starting making TV tuners for PC's, they provided software that did this feature. It would "listen" to closed captioning, and alert you if key words were mentioned (not unlike Pee Wee Herman's Word of The Day).
Anyway... Just doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me.
-pat.
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Re: Closed Caption Searching -- Already Around
The problem is this would only search things that were on right now, right? I mean what about the relevant show that's going to be on in an hour, or the next day? Most shows have an associated informational blurb (at least on my digital cable box), seems there could be a keyword section attached as well for some simple and useful searching there.
Of course most people would just search for all the shows with the keywords "sex" and "hot women":-)
msykes
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