Badredine Ladjemi
It has become a matter of fact that videos on the Internet attract an huge audience. However the content still lacks quality. Most of the videos online are UGC (User Generated Content) and have poor interest. So real, plain and boring TV is still the first market for advertising and video program! But it’s gonna change, and that will be sooner that you imagine…
The first idea which should come to you is Catch-Up TV. Actually it is now a standard. Every TV has its Catch-Up TV Platform. But for the users it’s the mess: they’ve to switch from a platform to another permanently if they want to watch what they want. Zapping which is a core TV functionality is not as easy in the Internet. Besides it doesn’t use the strength of the Web at all… It’s just like a TV receiver but on your web browser instead of your actual TV. Definitively not the future…
Imagine that instead of being passive while watching, you decide what you want to see. No more channels, just sources. You don’t wait for your favorite program, you watch what you want, it when you want. You just have to type what you’re looking for just like Google. Actually your next TV will be a web search engine!
In the early days of the Web, search engines used to index content based on META tags. They didn’t look into the real content of the web pages. Altavista was the most famous search engine of this time. But you’ve to trust what the webmaster said about his content. Oftenly you could be deceived and a lot of contents which was not described in the META was lost. Then the search engines, like Google or Yahoo, indexed inside the web pages themselves. They index the content.
Now for video, we’re still in the early days of indexing. Most of users search the content based on the title or description of the video. However the revolution the Web pages has known is repeating for videos. This innovation has come for the TV.
Recently new video search engine have been realeased. They let you search inside the content of TV program by retranscripting audio to text. Instead of a long description, I advise you to do the demo yourself :
- Orange 24/24 Actu: index french speaking news medias including TV, Radio and newspaper
- Voxalead: index TV News, Radio News, Video On Demand and Politics TV program in 16 languages
- Google Audio Indexing: index politics TV program in the US
- VideoSurf: index most of US, Canada and UK TV program including movies, soap and other TV shows
- TvEyes: monitors hundreds of TV and radio stations in United States, United Kingdom, Middle East, Canada, Greece and China provides 24/7 coverage through its easy-to-use Internet delivered service and includes real-time translation from any language into English.
Search in Orange 24/24 Actu
Search "Economy" in Voxalead
Google Audio Indexing
Search "Barack Obama" in VideoSurf
So we can imagine in a close future that every catch-up tv program will be indexed by one of these search engine.
And it will let users build their own channels based on what they’re looking for. For instance I want to build a channel following every action of a country leader in a specific topic, for instance Barack Obama on “economy”.
And if we can index the audio and video content of the TV program, we can also put contextual advertising inside video itself! And this is precisely contextual advertisting that has boost advertising efficiency and market on the Web. That could solve the issue of revenue of Internet advertising lower than TV advertising!
The revolution of advertising on the Internet is about suggesting you products that you really want. And during your favorite program, instead of having an ad cutting the program you will see a permanent newsticker suggesting you program you will probably like. Amazon recommandations system for video!
Last but not least, these new services are already going out of the browser. VideoSurf has launched a Firefox extension turning your web browser in a real TV terminal. Better : TVEyes is the first to offer Real-Time TV search and monitoring on iPhone.
VideoSurf Firefox Extension
These kind of innovations are going to dramatically change the nature of TV itself! The day of the traditional TV receiver are counted…
Trash your TV
