Reuters have introduced a search engine powered by Viewdle that enables the user to search though film footage for people. Within the results it shows you how many videos have been identified featuring the person you’re interested in, date of the video, the context, overall length and time the person is on screen for.
The search box includes predictive text (like Google suggest) letting you know what is availabke and helping you find the person you are looking for quickly. The search functionality is limited, I cannot for instance search for George Bush but exclude anything with Tony Blair in it.
There are a number of companies emerging in this space and there is an obvious route to monetising indeed Viewdle state “easily indexing, searching & monetizing video assets.” I wrote a blog recently on Ooyala a contextual video application that goes a step further than this indexing objects as well as people. It would be interesting to see what the technology is behind this i.e. is this utilising facial recognition or simply someone tracing the appearance of people within a video (like the photo tag function in Facebook but in video.)
Video search is certainly useful and will enable advertisers to successfully monitize an otherwise untapped medium. It will take a large and established search based company to successfully integrate this, perhaps the big G? Watch this space…
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