Internet Video Search is *Not* Easy

Russell Shaw should have stopped his video search entry with his disclaimer:

I don't know Perl script from Pearl Jam, but if you are talking about searching the Web for streaming video files and then indexing them I don't see what the big deal is.

The big deal that Shaw isn't considering is that personal video publishing is coming quickly on the heels of blogging and photoblogging. I'm acting like quite the broadband Grinch in this post, but I expect serious prominent bloggers to understand We-the-Media trends, not miss them entirely and ridicule the smart coders who are working to solve hard problems.

Blinkx, Yahoo, Google, and Feedster are planning for tens of millions of Internet video publishers not the "hundreds" that Shaw dealt with during the Internet Boom or the thousands for which he suggests a solution. The Google News search model, which works great for scraping professional content, is exactly what the vendors are all working to move beyond.

Finally, as its Video Search homepage makes clear, Yahoo is using RSS in the way that Shaw whines that no one is:

"Part of our strategy for video is to leverage the momentum of RSS and the community,” said Bradley Horowitz, director of multimedia search at Yahoo.

One of the main reasons for Yahoo's push towards extending RSS further towards rich media is that HTML crawler improvements (even Google's) have not sufficiently improved their ability to find a huge number of rich media files buried in subdirectories, player logic, javascript, etc.

Posted by scottrafer, December 30, 2004 11:06 PM | | TrackBack