Digitalsmiths Launches VideoSense 2.0 Platform With Frame-By-Frame Video Search
June 28, 2009 ·Filed Under Technology News
Digitalsmiths, the video distribution and analysis platform that powers TheWB.com, TMZ, and a number of other popular sites, is rolling out a new product suite today dubbed VideoSense 2.0. The new suite includes a number of features that will produce it more appealing to subject matter owners looking to distribute video across the web, but the most interesting new feature for consumers will be the platform’s revamped video search, which can best be described as a “Google for video”.
Granted, there already is a Google video search, but that goes well beyond that, allowing users to search for any actor, scene, or piece of dialog they’d like across shows in the Digitalsmiths library. Digitalsmiths has spent years building the technology to perform speech recognition and visually match actors’ faces and environmental elements (it can tell whether a scene is taking at a beach or on a mountainside), and it’s quite impressive.
Before now the search has been available on a limited scale, but users would have to first fine tune their queries using a number of drop-down menus, specifying which show they’d like to search through and choosing from a number of other options (these helped speed searches up by limiting the composition the engine would have to look through). Now Digitalsmiths has refined the technology to the point that it can offer a Google-like search bar, with the engine able to automatically detect whether a search term refers to a
Unfortunately, while its search functionality is much improved, it’s being held up to some extent by the composition owners. In theory Digitalsmiths could put together an engine that searched through all of its composition at once, which really would produce it akin to an extremely mighty Google for video. But the substance owners have not agreed to enable that functionality, so for now all searches will be be constrained to partner sites and widgets (e.g. you’ll have to head to TheWB.com whether you want to search through its shows). Hopefully the subject matter owners will have a change of heart, as that kind of universal search could prove immensely useful.
The new product suite includes a handful of products that will appeal to substance owners, including a new Asset Manager, which handles things like video ingestion, storage, and processing, and Publisher, which allows composition owners to schedule when their subject matter will be posted.
Other players in that space include Auditude and Viewdle.
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