The bulls eye? Advertising: Online, Print, and now Television...Google is brilliant!
I've spent the better part of the past three days envisioning the concepts of Internet TV and specifically GoogleTV. I have a few ideas that I'll develop later on.
SiliconValley says: Clearly, Google has big plans for GoogleTV. Just what they are remains to be seen, but a paper presented by the company back in 2003 offers a few clues. An excerpt:
"In this paper we study the problem of finding news articles on the web
relevant to the ongoing stream of TV broadcast news. Our approach is to
extract queries from the ongoing stream of closed captions, issue the
queries in real time to a news search engine on the web, and
postprocess the top results to determine the news articles that we show
to the user. We evaluated a variety of algorithms for this problem,
looking at the impact of inverse document frequency, stemming,
compounds, history, and query length on the relevance and coverage of
news articles returned in real time during a broadcast. We also
evaluated several postprocessing techniques for improving the
precision, including reranking using additional terms, reranking by
document similarity, and filtering on document similarity. The best
algorithm achieves a precision of 91% on one data set and 84% on a
second data set and finds a relevant article for at least 70% of the
topics in the data sets.
... The framework of the system is not limited to news, however; we
have considered simple methods of detecting other genres (such as
sports, weather, and "general" topics) and sending such queries to
appropriate web information sources. The genres could be identified by
using machine learning on a labelled corpus of television captions; an
even simpler way would be to use television schedules and their
associated metadata to categorize the current show into a genre.
Overall this will be a great move for Google, and in many ways a spear head into the heart of media...as they look deep into the eyes of the Yahoo media group in Santa Monica, CA and Fox Interactive Media (also said to be relocating to Santa Monica, CA).
There are also a few folks orbiting the Internet - TV universe.
Recently I spoke with Suranga Chandratillake, co-founder of blinkx.
I also met John Lee at a NATPE conference late last year where he caught me up to speed with iTV and what I assume will soon be seen as StimTV part of Npowr based in Oxnard, CA. At this same conference I spoke with Akimbo.
I just returned from a week in Redmond meeting with Microsoft. They are trying to recruit me. We discussed similar ideas including Microsoft's approach with HD but I signed their NDA so mums the word.
The difference between GoogleTV and their association with Google Current TV involves the direction of revenues. GoogleTV Google Makes money, Current TV Google is spending money (advertising Google).
Others worth mentioning:
Slingbox
Brightcove
Lightningcast
Critical Mention
