Om and I sat down this week to discuss the current and future state of video creation and distribution technologies. We both expect many video-related announcements from this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that will bring a wider variety of video consumption products into the living room. We also talked about new ways for amateurs to create and share videos online and using specialized portable hardware such as the iPod video.
I don’t think any search company currently is doing a good job indexing video content. Even audio content has been a big challenge. Closed-captioning provides a bridge to video indexing from the text-based search engines of today but Yahoo!’s Media RSS approach to video search reminds me of the days when search engines trusted meta keywords and description values as fairly accurate representations of a page’s content. We may still lack the proper computing power to properly index audio and analyze frames of video.
We also discussed the popularity of sites such as YouTube fueled by the distribution of what may be copyrighted and illegal material. Will content providers start to crack down on these advertising supported websites? How can video hosting startups compete when I know my content is more stable hosted by an established industry player such as Google with its Google Video product?
This week’s podsession on emerging video trends is 21 minutes and 46 seconds in length and a 10 MB download.
Tags: ces, homevideo, amateurvideo, video