Fishburn Hedges

03.06.2010

The release of the iPad in Europe has once again focused attention on news providers’ plans to increase their multi-media content. The complete elision of broadcast and print, long since forecast, will be with us very soon.

Yet for all the progress in online video quality and streaming capability, decent video content search still remains elusive. Google’s Audio Indexing project is still in development, while Quaero, a French government-sponsored video research project showcased last week, is still in its infancy.

Thomson Reuters, which rebranded its TV service as Reuters Insider last month, has cottoned on to the importance of video search. Its new offering includes searchable automated transcripts aimed at its investor audience. A great start, but the examples that I have seen demonstrate just how much can get lost in translation. Anyone who has ever tried to order cinema tickets over the phone knows that voice recognition technology still has a little way to go.

Corporates are increasingly turning to Google news, blog and twitter searches for text monitoring purposes. Many believe that traditional monitoring providers are not providing enough of a value-add for keeping tabs on the non specialised press online. Yet they, like the professional monitors, will be affected by News Corp’s decision to disallow third parties (with the exeption of Murdoch-owned Factiva) to access its new paywall protected sites.

As monitoring agencies become increasingly squeezed they will inevitably be looking at how they can package and sell online video search facilities to corporate clients. Once again they will almost certainly be in competition with Google while at the same time fighting news providers, keen to monetise their expensively-produced content.

It will be fascinating to see how this new battle for search plays out.

Posted by Paul French