Always ready to weigh in on .Communism, Hal.As Groucho Marx once said:
TVW/Reiter is the base for a nice business, but it's incomplete.
One thing that's missing is, as you suggest, the AXC "value add." It's inconceivable that AXC doesn't intend to bring some seductive technology to the party. Hopefully, what AXC comes up with will be *licensible* as well.
As you know, I'm looking for an AXC logo on every broadcast/narrowcast/outcast/outhouse Web site. (Hey, we let Ray Dolby get away; let's at least *learn* something from him!) Wouldn't we like to see something like an AXC "player selector" with this technology, or at least deals with MSFT and RNWK to put AXC technology in their players?
Three way cool things are right on top: 1) the Internet equivalent of PIP (picture-in-picture), 2) embedded links in video images, and 3) the issue I presented to Dave Gardy last week--the transformation of titles and graphics. There's much more, though, especially when you get into serious engineering domains like caching, compression, effects and audio. There are so many places for AXC to contribute it's almost too good to be true.
Want one that would make AXC an instant household word? Here's the most boffo news release with which AXC could strike: Buy WinAMP (Nullsoft) and MP3.com, and take "ownership" of MP3 before RNWK (or someone else) "gets" this nuclear metaphor. It's truly astounding that nobody has stepped up to the MP3 plate and grabbed these two firms. Heck, I'd trade my Sgt. Preston deed to a "square inch of the Yukon" (CA 1957?) for them. MP3's already huge and its quality is world-class.
Here's a link to my discussion with analyst Steve Harmon about RNWK and MP3:
Message 7865982
And here's a relevant "Wired" piece on MP3:
wired.com
Next, we have the video search engine business. The video search function belongs as an integral part of AXC's Web strategy. I introduced FasTV.com to the thread a couple of days ago. Here it is again:
fastv.com
And I've included at the bottom of this post a "San Jose Mercury News" article that suggests where multimedia search is going. Why AXC needs this function is obvious.
Finally, AXC needs something else: One or more media or Internet "strategic relationships." There are at least two dozen firms with whom deals could be made, ranging from AMZN to ZD. Some of these guys bring cash. Others bring reach and traffic. All of them bring prestige and momentum. And all of them bring Wall Street. All AXC has to do is write the pitch and say the "secret word."
Right, Groucho?
So Hal, is there an upside here?
Comments?
BAM
***
Posted at 12:02 a.m. PDT Tuesday, September 29, 1998
Clinton scandal boosts Web searches
BY JON HEALEY
Mercury News Staff Writer
President Clinton may not be thrilled about his videotaped grand-jury testimony being on the Internet, but for two California companies, the tape was in the right place at the right time.
Virage Inc. of San Mateo and FASTV Inc. of Los Angeles are using the testimony to demonstrate ways to search online video clips for specific words or phrases -- a capability that's never been available before to the general public. At two World Wide Web sites (http://video.altavista.com and fastv.com), people can use the Virage and FASTV technology, respectively, to search the Clinton videotape for their favorite juicy bits.
At the two demonstration sites, visitors enter a phrase to search for, and the site comes back with clips containing the phrase and relevant context.
For example, anyone who wants to see Clinton talk about conspiracies can search for the words ''Tripp'' and ''set me up.'' They will produce one to two segments showing Clinton accusing Linda Tripp of conspiring with the lawyers for Paula Jones and the independent counsel's office to lure him into committing perjury.
The companies' work represents another step in the Internet's gradual evolution into a multimedia environment where audio and video are as prevalent and useful as text and graphics. It also reflects how much more quickly the Internet adapts to events than, say, television or newspapers, where the pace of technological change moves is glacial by comparison.
Virage and FASTV are among the many entrepreneurs who have responded to the recent deluge of White House scandal material on the Internet with new products. In addition to dozens of Web sites selling copies of independent counsel Kenneth Starr's report to Congress or Clinton's videotape, online merchants have assembled an Internet souvenir stand of sorts, offering scandal-themed cigars, T-shirts, even doctored nude photos of the principal figures.
Unlike those hucksters, though, Virage and FASTV officials say they didn't create their products to take advantage of Clinton's troubles. Instead, both companies have been working for several months on their search technology and waiting for the right moment to make it widely available.
FASTV, in fact, has not made its ''official premiere'' yet, although it has been demonstrating its technology quietly for several months to broadcasters and others, President Bill Swegles said. The full-scale debut will be later this year, he said.
Virage, which also makes software that TV producers use to catalog videotapes, plans to sell its technology to companies for use on Web sites or private networks. FASTV, on the other hand, plans to operate its own search service, with online videos provided by a number of networks and programmers. These include C-SPAN -- the cable TV network that covers Congress -- and the American Film Institute, Swegles said.
The new video-searching technology adds to the Internet's main strength as a research tool: the huge amount of material it makes available for searching and sorting. Video clips must be put into a special format before they can be searched, however, and at this point, the only video available to the public in that format is the Clinton testimony.
Not that there's a lot of video in any format on the Internet. Web sites make little use of video, largely because it's impossible to get a TV-quality picture online without a high-speed connection.
Such handicaps don't afflict printed texts on the Internet, which do not need to be massaged in any way before they can be searched. Nevertheless, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, said that the new video searching technology could be a better research tool than the traditional text-only search services.
''The difference is being able to hear tone,'' Jamieson said. ''There's a real difference between someone sounding angry, sounding hurt, sounding sad, sounding ironic . . . You can't convey irony in print without using a lot of verbal markers.'' Both companies' technology works by marking frames of a digitized video with text from the closed captions -- the hidden transcriptions included with most broadcasts for the sake of viewers with poor hearing. This technique works on much of the material emanating from Hollywood, but not on raw footage or live feeds from a news event.
That limitation could soon disappear, though. Virage is expected to announce today an agreement with IBM Corp. to incorporate its speech recognition software into the video searching technology, and Swegles said that FASTV plans to make a similar move soon. |
