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Searching for video content online may be a hard nut to crack, but that hasn't stopped fierce competitors Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) from entering the fray, albeit in different fashions.
Search engines must consider both the difficulty of searching video using a written medium and the intellectual property rights of the content owners.
That may be why Google, which yesterday unveiled the beta of its Google Video, has started by offering a service that searches the transcripts and close-captioning of television shows. It provides a snapshot image but no video with the results.
Same Search, Different Results
A search for "Condoleeza Rice," for example, turned up results from ABC, CBS, C-SPAN, C-SPAN2, Fox, NBC, PBS, UPN, WB and San Francisco's KRON.
Yahoo, which added a video search tab to its search and home pages the same day Google announced its beta, scours the whole Web and gives users a link to use to download the video file. Yahoo uses meta data from RSS feeds to find content.
The "Condoleeza Rice" search on Yahoo netted links to Stanford's online video site, San Francisco Independent Media Center and the Heritage Foundation, among others. Yahoo has also partnered with TVEyes, whose search capability includes video from Bloomberg, BBC and BskyB.
"Google is wisely treading lightly in what they're enabling," Michael Gartenberg, senior analyst at Jupiter Media, told TechNewsWorld. "Linking to video is not something that they couldn't do, they just don't want to get sued."
Forrester analyst Charlene Li sees another problem with the idea of video search: "[T]here's a dearth of video content that people really care about on the Web," she wrote in her blog.
It Takes Time
Li likened the nascent market to that of online music.
"While Yahoo and Google are both eager to carve out relationships with Hollywood producers, the reality is it will take years before the really good video content will be available online due to rights management and copyright issues," she wrote.
She also suggests that Google has purposely chosen not to link to video in order to goose studios into recognizing that readily available content could be a way to earn them more money. Google said the search is designed to help viewers find shows they might want to watch and would otherwise not know about and added that later versions will allow for clip viewing and expand beyond television.
Google was a late entry into the video search market. On December 1, Singingfish, owned by AOL, launched its redesigned multimedia search portal, which includes results from file formats MP3, Quicktime, Real and Windows Media Player.
Blinkx.tv, launched by Blinkx, an independent San Francisco company, on December
16, uses special software to capture and index TV content.
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