Searching Television News
A new free service from multimedia search engine TVEyes lets you search each and every word spoken during TV news broadcasts from well-known news organizations.
A new free service from multimedia search engine TVEyes lets you search each and every word spoken during TV news broadcasts from well-known news organizations.
A new free service from multimedia search engine TVEyes lets you search each and every word spoken during TV news broadcasts from well-known news organizations.
TVEyes is using voice recognition technology to create a “spoken word index” that makes these programs keyword searchable.
You’ll find the search box on the TVEyes home page. Searching is simple and straightforward. Enter your keywords and go. Results can be sorted by relevance or date. A spokesperson told me that the database is constantly updated. Remember, the index you’re searching is generated using voice recognition technology, a far from perfect approach, so don’t be surprised if you occasionally find errors.
Where does the content come from? You’ll can view (or soon view) material from:
One drawback with the service is that you’re only able to search video news content the sources have made available on the open web. Not every segment from every news program is placed on the web. Also, most of these sources are available via other sites.
What TVEyes brings to the table is the ability to search every word spoken and then go directly to a specific portion(s) of the video. BlinkxTV also offers keyword search of some of their video content. In some cases the actual transcript can also be seen.
TVEyes for a Fee, Very Useful
In addition to the free TVEyes service, the company also offers a sophisticated subscription-based video search service. It’s used in many industries, including media and public relations, media organizations and educational institutions to name just a few.
The fee-based TVEyes also know as TVEyes Professional offers near real-time (delayed by only a couple of minutes) searchable transcripts (created in many cases using closed captioning) of television programming on most U.S. major networks, local stations throughout the U.S., and a selection of stations around the world like BBC1, CBC Newsworld, and Al Jazeera (English language service). A free trial is available.
The fee-based service offers email alerts so when a name, word, company or other important word is mentioned on the air, a subscriber is notified within minutes of the airing.
Podcast Search from Podscope
TVEyes is the company that powers Podscope. This service, launched last April lets you keyword search podcasts using speech recognition technology (again it’s not a perfect transcript). Podscope also makes other video and audio content (both submitted by users and found via their crawl) keyword searchable.
Last September, we learned that Podscope will power podcast search on AOL. In December Podscope began offering keyword-based RSS feeds. In other words, when the keywords you select are mentioned in a podcast, you’re notified via RSS. Here’s a Robin Good interview with the man in charge of TVEyes/Podcast, David Ives. More about Podscope here.
NOTE: Article links often change. In case of a bad link, use the publication’s search facility, which most have, and search for the headline.