Hulu Hops Onto Caption Search Technology

By Dave Fidlin

With the Internet maturing and online video become the norm - not a novelty item - enhancements are being created for streaming content. Caption searching, one of those enhancements, was added recently to the popular site Hulu. But a smattering of smaller companies had already been offering a similar service before Hulu added the feature to its site in late December.

Hulu Labs, the online video portal’s development arm, is running the feature in beta while engineers continue to work on perfecting the technology.

In a statement, Eugene Wei, Hulu’s vice president of product, says the feature will enable users to search for captions of thousands of videos across hundreds of shows. For now, Wei says users can access the feature through Hulu Labs’ website. Eventually, a feature tab will be included on all Hulu shows that have captions.

Wei points out how captions search might be beneficial to a viewer of an online video. Wei says he was watching an episode of “House” recently, and a joke between main character Dr. Foreman and Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin took place. Wei says he was in a quandary when he wanted to watch the episode a second time.

“I couldn’t remember which episode it was in, let alone which moment within the episode,” Wei says in the statement. “With the new caption search, I just type in ‘Mike Tomlin,’ and voila.”

Jason Blackwell, practice director with ABI Research, says features like Hulu’s caption search will be an asset to users with online content growing exponentially each year.

“It’s going to be important for all service providers,” Blackwell says. “I think (Hulu’s caption search) is an important step in what will become the future.”

Blackwell says ABI will soon begin to study features like caption search and examine specifically how it can be beneficial not only to online video, but other specialized services, such as pay TV and other cable and satellite services with a user interface.

While Hulu’s caption search is breaking new ground for the company, it is not a pioneer in the technology. Numerous smaller companies have offered similar services, some as long as five years.

One of those companies, Realtime Transcription Inc., offers a service called Transendia. Tanya Ward English, technology director for Realtime Transcription, says Transendia offers a video search based on the full text of a transcript, in addition to glossary tags for non-spoken information within a video.

Ward English says Transendia caters to a higher-end market. Many of the company’s clients do not want videos hosted on such public sites as YouTube. Instead, she says, those clients opt to use a customized player with full search and playing options from Transendia.

“One of the most useful and unique things about our technology, I think, is something upon which we have a patent pending,” Ward English says. “That’s the ability go pin-point search video or audio files directly from a text search engine like Google or Bing.”

Ward English, a self-described advocate for people with hearing loss, says caption search technology is especially beneficial for online users who have such a condition.

Blinkx, another smaller, specialized company, was launched in 2005 and went public two years later. Suranga Chandratillake, CEO and founder of Blinkx, says his company offers an advanced video search engine feature that gives online video users an opportunity to not only search for captions within a program, but to look for titles and episode names of particular programs.

“We can extract a lot of information from what’s going on inside a video,” Chandratillake says. “Our video search engine doesn’t just work on our own site. It can also get results from other sites like YouTube, or any other site with video out there.”

Chandratillake says Blinkx has been a popular service with advertisers, and revenue has doubled in the past three years.

More companies are sure to join Hulu, Realtime Transcription, Blinkx and others as the quest continues to make caption search technology an integral part of online video.

Desktop in Your Pocket: Citrix’s Nirvana Phone

By Sheila Shayon

Nirvana has arrived on your smart phone. Citrix Systems, Inc., a leading provider of virtualization, networking and software-as-a-service (SaaS) technologies, recently unveiled its nirvana phone. You can leave your laptop at home or at the office, and use your smartphone for full access to your main system - just plug in full-size peripherals and have access - not to pared-down mobilized apps, but the full nirvana.

A mobile worker simply docks his or her smart phone and enjoys the full functionality of a desktop PC. “The paradigm shift is adding video out functionality, and a large screen and keyboard. Previous attempts to make smaller PCs or handsets failed, as they were too big, too heavy and too expensive,” says Chris Fleck, VP of community and solutions development. Nirvana enables computing locally, with a small form factor and compatibility envelope.”

Citrix’s nirvana phone is a critical advance in the convergence of mobile devices and cloud computing. Its reference architecture comes from a partnership with OK Labs and several ecosystem partners including semiconductor suppliers, handset OEMs, enterprise IT suppliers and mobile network operators (MNOs).

OK Labs, the global leader in virtualization software for mobile devices, consumer electronics and embedded systems, is backed by the largest independent team of microkernel developers, and OKL4 is deployed on more than 500 million mobile phones worldwide.

The architecture leverages Mobile-to-Enterprise (M2E) virtualization, cloud computing and wireless connectivity (3G, WiFi, Bluetooth). It includes emerging functionality in mobile chipsets and handsets such as full video resolution and HD output.

According to Citrix, first adopters include:

• Power Users: people who work from several locations, using fewer devices
• Road Warriors: travel without your laptop and deliver presentations easily
• ER Heroes: quickly plug into a display anywhere in the hospital
• Selective Shoppers: BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)
• Roaming Consultants: select a cubicle, dock and work.

Although first adopters are primarily IT and mobile workers, the nirvana phone applies equally to consumers. “Instead of connecting through a company cloud, you can be at work and connect remotely to your PC at home. You can use it with your HDTV living room display; it works with digital picture frames. Most hotels have in-room flat panel displays, and guest business offices - all are compatible with the nirvana phone,” Fleck says. “Movies may be one of the first built-in capabilities for the consumer.”

According to Citrix research, 70 percent of people would prefer to leave their laptops at home when traveling. Nirvana phones, dubbed a “virtual desktop in your pocket,” use mobile virtualization to deliver the “full productivity experience” from any location with wireless coverage.

Citrix is in talks with all the major carriers, Fleck says. “We don’t take sides. We are device agnostic and connection enablers.” Asked about the name, Fleck says, “We looked at the current limitations of smartphones, and looked at what the ideal phone could be - taking it beyond what is, to nirvana - right in your pocket or your purse.”

UK Launches Semantic Data Site: Will the Rest of the World Follow?

By Linda Broughton

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, credited with conceptualizing if not inventing the World Wide Web, is not finished yet.

Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, both appointed as Information Advisors to the UK Government, are coordinating Data.gov.uk. Data.gov.uk plans to provide the general public with a single access point to all the United Kingdom’s national, regional and local statistics, surveys and studies - all the information in the UK collected under the umbrella of the national government.

In a passionate speech at TED, Berners-Lee explains that no data is an island - it’s the relationships between different data that make the data valuable, insightful and useful. And these relationships are not often visible to the human eye - if anything, our own preconceptions and individual personalities often interpret rather than understand the relationships between different data, closing us off to real social trends and concerns.

Berners-Lee wants to use the Web to bypass the human attempts to dress up data for personal or political purposes. Instead, he wants the Data.gov.uk platform to expose the real significance buried within the data-to-data relationships through encouraging the digital mapping of raw, unadulterated social, political and economic data. Berners-Lee calls this ‘linked data,’ a precursor to the semantic Web that he believes will one day explain the meaning behind how we collect, calculate, evaluate and use the data that we post online.

Not all of these data relationships will be obviously significant - imagine an application that maps the relationship between data discussing the annual amount of Cadbury chocolate sold in Yorkshire and the corresponding annual number of failed marriages within the same geographical location and time period. However, the project is expected to help identify unexpected and insightful data relationships, insights that would normally take several decades and hundreds or thousands of brilliant socialist scientists, statisticians, psychologists, focus groups and public policy experts to simply suspect.

The automatic data relationship mapping will allow the UK government and the UK public to discover connections, trends and causal relationships that will inform public policy for decades to come. If implemented properly, Data.gov.uk could come very close to comprehensively mapping and explaining the past and real-time behavior of the public - and thus allow platform users to accurately plan the future of a society.

Of course, the key to the concept is the raw data. Currently, there are already third-party applications that map roads and potholes in the UK, provide statistics and information about the location of doctors throughout the UK, and give up-to-date information about local schools. This is useful data to aggregate but it is not yet generating anything that a few quick, targeted searches online can’t. The next push will encourage interested developers to create applications linking the different data to generate data relationship maps that give researchers at think tanks and academic institutions something to ponder and investigate.

Supporters of the open data movement are urging private businesses to follow the UK government’s example and release their raw data to the public. If the private sector keeps its data too close and too secret, the sector risks losing potential profits that would arise from information generated by an external comparison and review of their aggregated data. Moreover, the private sector makes up an important part of modern society. Accurately identifying, explaining and impacting public trends requires more than the government’s analysis of the population’s behavior, it requires an accurate understanding of the public’s practices in commerce and industry.

Data.gov.uk may soon be the way for the UK government (and anyone else interested) to keep several fingers not only on the pulse of modern UK society, but on its stomach, windpipe, eyes, mouth, ears, etc. The platform and its third-party applications may soon provide an in-depth and automatic monitor of modern British, Scottish and Northern Irish daily public life. Do the industries want to jump in now, developing their own applications and supplying their own data to complete the public picture, or will there always be a yawning gap in the data buried in the private sector’s own digital databanks?

http://www.opte.org/maps/tests/

The Paywall Debate: A Historical Perspective

By Sheila Shayon

The New York Times Company recently announced a paid, metered model for  the beginning of 2011. Users will have free access to an - as yet - unspecified number of articles per month, and then be charged when usage exceeds that number.

What they’re looking for - like all Web publishers, is additional revenue streams. The company says this will provide the “necessary flexibility to keep an appropriate ratio between free and paid content and stay connected to a search-driven Web.”

“Our new business model is designed to provide additional support for The New York Times‘ extraordinary, professional journalism,” says Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman of The New York Times Company and publisher of The New York Times. “Our audiences are very loyal and we believe that our readers will pay for our award-winning digital content and services.”

News Corp, the largest and loudest proponent of ‘pay-to-play’ online content, has also begun rolling out pay walls for its online news. “We’ll be charging for online wherever we have publications,” says chairman and CEO, Rupert Murdoch. “Consumers are willing to pay to be entertained and informed.”

And therein lies the problem.  According to Joseph Turow, professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, “The media history of the 20th century has been teaching people that content is cheap. It goes as far back as the late 19th century, when The Ladies Home Journal and Saturday Evening Post exhorted readers to buy what their advertisers were selling, because they support your magazine. There has always been the intrusion of advertisers - you, the consumer, don’t have to pay for anything because it’s all ad-supported. But - this does not work on the Web.”

Media history is a series of outmoded distribution and economic models being ported from one technology to another - without requisite reinvention or evolution: newspapers and radio to TV and now the Internet. The basic equation of distribution, access and revenue - has not yet been adjusted for the Web.

A bit of historical perspective is helpful in understanding the axial moment we’ve arrived at today regarding a fundamental shift in the delivery and economics of mass media. It was the advertising industry, in the 1920s, which first coined the term medium as a backdrop to placing ads across different media, which were previously known as publications.

In the early 1960s, Marshall McLuhan coined the term global village. It described the end of an individualistic, visual, print culture due to emerging electronic media, which would move society from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, and a “tribal base.” These comments, made in the 1960s, of a global village, interconnected by an electronic nervous system pre-dated the Internet but stamped the concept into the DNA of popular culture 30 years before it actually happened.

Digitally defined pay walls have been compared to the Internet equivalent of the Berlin Wall. Professional journalists fear the disintermediation wrought by the Web, especially the burgeoning forms of social media such as blogging, and massive content factories employing amateur experts for meager wages.

Simultaneously, it’s a fact that bloggers and crowdsourcing are uncovering news otherwise not covered. Traditional journalists writing behind pay walls are prevented from building their own personal brands, while un-credentialed and unskilled writers can rise to the top of their peer heap in meritocratic online communities.

The explosion of social media bloggers underscores the fact that the online experience is not just about the content.  It is about the relationship. Pay walls limit a news organization’s relationship with its customers - the public.

Pay wall proponents are exponents of news organizations no longer providing free content at point of delivery. The underlying theory is that this will augment the value of news content by reinstating rules of scarcity and habituating a new generation to paying for news.

The pay wall protestors affirm a fundamental lack of understanding of the information abundance era — a misguided effort to sustain a 20th century ethos of intermediated media. Charging for content depends on an entitlement environment, an antiquated business model built on scarcity and publishers who control the food chain.

Charging is replete with its own lack of profitability: increased marketing expenses; smaller audience; less ad revenue; fewer clicks and links. The new linked economy, leveraging networks and specialization efficiencies born of Web usage, demands collaboration.

The following timeline takes a historical point of view on major metrics for when the media of newspaper, radio, television and Internet reached mass (for the time) distribution, and how and when audiences began to pay for content. The incubation period ranges from 1615 years for newspapers; 21 years for radio and 14 for TV. The Internet still hasn’t been able to prove a pay model for its content, but e-commerce agent, Amazon, did post a profit in 2002.

The entire content industry is in upheaval. Transformative technology, free public classified sites like Craigslist, the impact of the economy on advertising and fundamental changes in consumer habits, add up to new rules and shifting business models.

“We are now in the midst of an epochal debate over the value of content, and it is clear to many newspapers that the current model is malfunctioning,” Newscorp’s Murdoch says.

One thought is that e-readers may ’save the goose,’ holding the line for charging at the handheld device portal.

“It’s a continual process of advertisers taking over and supporting media, and a continuing dilemma: denying the right of professionals to be paid for what they do. People go to The Huffington Post and feel they’ve read the NY Times. The propositions that worked historically for radio and TV were ported to the Internet and they just don’t work there,” Turow says.

TV’s Web Widgets Won’t Replace Internet

By Barbara Gengler

While today’s consumer is most likely to watch online video on the PC screen, manufacturers like Samsung, Sony and LG are offering widgets based on screen content that runs alongside your regular viewing.

TV widgets make it easy to interact with Internet content and offer services that complement and enhance traditional TV viewing — but industry experts say consumers are not looking for the Internet on their television sets.

Content partnerships are being made between Internet companies and content providers. For instance, Yahoo! accelerated its approach to Internet access on the TV through its widget platform by announcing new distribution partnerships with Hisense, ViewSonic, MIPS Technologies and Sigma Designs. New content partners include CNBC, NBC, RadioTime, The Weather Channel, Brightcove and others.

The Weather Channel widget, for example, allows viewers to access information on current conditions and five-day forecasts while CNBC’s widget allows viewers to interact with real-time stock quotes and create real-time watch lists.

ViewSonic plans to integrate Yahoo!s Widget Engine Platform into its media player while MIPS Technologies will develop an optimized reference platform running Yahoo!’s Widget Engine for digital TV and set-top box applications.

Yahoo says its new Widget Development Kit can be downloaded by anyone who wants “to create, deploy and monetize engaging TV widget experiences.”

In-Stat analyst Keith Nissen says one of the important questions is will the devices permit the user open access to the Internet via the TV.

“When you’re subscribing to Sony’s set of online video, (which you can get directly from a Sony TV set), they have various websites or content that is available, but you can’t go to any site but to whatever Sony has programmed in,” Nissen says. “I don’t think most PC users want the TV to be a PC.”

Nissen points out Over the Top (OTT) video delivered to the TV via broadband services is starting to take place. OTT services run over the top of an existing broadband service and are not controlled by the service provider. OTT video will not be taking off until providers offer content you can’t get on the Internet, he says.

“Sony, Disney, Fox and Comcast will look at this as a new distribution channel,” Nissen says. “They want a distribution channel to market directly to the end user and monetize it.”

Nissen mentions that while widgets are nice, they are not earning money. According to Nissen, 98 percent of TV widgets are free and the amount of money earned from widgets is less than 2 percent.

“It’s a technology that service providers have to have to be competitive but no one is expecting to make money on it,” he says. “We’ve found what people want from a widget, is they want it to be complementary to what they already have access too, it’s not a slam dunk and I don’t think that’s the end game.”

Alternatively, while Yahoo! talks up its new distribution partnerships for Yahoo! Widget Engine Platform, DivX launched its embedded Internet TV platform that provides access to a line-up of online media content streamed directly to any connected device from any manufacturer.

DivX, a pioneer in bringing high-quality Internet video to consumer electronics, says LG Electronics will be the first manufacturer to license the DivX TV platform. In addition, Advanced Digital broadcast, Bluestreak, Brightcove, Broadcom, Innovation DTV Solutions, Iomega and ViewSonic also signed on.

DivX says its platform can be supported on any kind of Internet-connected consumer electronics device, including digital televisions, Blu-Ray players, gaming consoles, pay-TV operators set-top devices and mobile phones.

What’s more, Forrester Research found TV makers like LG, Samsung and Sony announced connected TV strategies that make consumer sense. “Enabled by tools like Yahoo! TV Widgets as well as IP-delivered services from Amazon.com, Blockbuster and Netflix, the connected TV is here to stay,” Forrester analyst James McQuivery says, “and millions will roll off production lines in 2010.”

Connecting the TV does not cut any existing players out of the picture, but instead, creates opportunities for content providers, advertisers, retailers and TV service providers to deepen their relationships with customers by serving their content needs, according to McQuivery.

While Internet users will stick to their PCs, widget technology looks to turn into an fascinating niche in the short term while browsing and watching content from the Internet might just be as easy as cable in the long term.

Mobile Apps: A Long-Term Investment

By Rebecca Henely

With 4G/LTE technology looming and more than 140,000 mobile applications currently available in Apple.com’s App Store, mobile apps have become an attractive new venture for companies.

Yet as with any new technology for a new marketplace, the profitability of putting out a new app for a company can be uncertain.

According to a new Forrester study titled the ROI of Mobile by Julie A. Ask, start-up costs for an app encompass more than just the initial creation, and companies must consider a variety of factors when estimating consumer adoption.

“Calculating the ROI of emerging technologies and services that depend on consumer behavior is challenging,” Ask states in the study. “Some may argue that it is part art and part science.”

Ask’s study states apps can be beneficial to a company. They can increase sales and customers not only through purchases via mobile device, but also by guiding customers to brick-and-mortar locations and delivering promotions to increase the amount of purchases per visit. Some company infrastructure costs like facility leasing and maintenance, personnel, costs related to inventory, or material costs may also be cut down company-wide if the app is popular.

Many companies want to have a mobile presence, as well. In a recent survey by R2integrated, 22 percent of respondents named mobile marketing as “very important” to their overall marketing strategy, with 26 percent naming it ”important” and 28 naming it “somewhat important.”

However, Ask states, building and distributing an app can increase costs in other areas aside from the initial cost for building the app and the licensing. These can include service fees, costs of delivering messages to customers, distribution deals with carriers, marketing the app, time spent training or re-organizing personnel to handle support for the mobile app.

“The cost and time to build the apps is greater than anticipated,” Randy Paskal of Moviola, which recently created the

Pro Video Guide app for sale on Apple. “The more time we spend making sure that we are building a quality product the better the results. A fair amount of trial and error has occurred during this process.” Then there comes the question of whether the app will be used.

“With an emerging medium like mobile, it is difficult to forecast consumer adoption and usage,” Ask states. “Benefits such as sales are easily quantified because they go directly to the bottom line. Others - such as increasing customer satisfaction by 0.2 percent - may be more difficult to quantify.”

The article suggests companies must estimate consumer adoption over the next three to five years, but also how often consumers will use the device and how much profit will be earned through usage.

“For a mobile app to be a considerable additional revenue stream, you need to ensure what’s been offered is enticing,” states Marc Edwards, director and lead designer for mobile app development company Bjango Studios. “Also, make sure you do your homework on what’s available. The App Store contains almost 200,000 apps, so most ideas have been done at least once (often badly).”

Edwards, as well as other companies, seem to be following Ask’s advice already. Paskal stated Moviola expects its app to recover its cost within the first year.

The tax-assistance company TurboTax says it sees its SnapTax app, which is available to California residents who want to file a 1040EZ or 1040A form this year, as a test to see if the market for doing taxes on mobile is viable.

“The challenge is how to balance the scope of what you want (or could) cover with maintaining a simple, easy customer experience,” says Colleen Gatlin, manager of corporate communications for TurboTax. “For example, we could consider broadening the reach to audiences with more complicated tax situations but is that the right kind of experience for filing taxes from your phone? Also, is there enough of an audience for the app and in this case, we believe so. [There is] lots of room to expand (other states, other platforms), but important to learn first.”

Developing a partnership can also help, states Ben Kazez, founder of Mobiata, which has created a number of travel apps. ”With our travel partners, we’re able to offer much shorter times till profitability (for companies looking to make revenue through mobile), since the mobile travel platform we’ve built and field-tested enables us to develop apps at a fraction the cost of internal IT teams,” he states. Kazez says the most important thing when creating an app is quality.

An app can’t be poorly designed or badly engineered. “We’ve seen some general digital creative shops getting their feet wet with app development, sometimes for very large clients. Their work hasn’t been tested the way ours has - not just by quality assurance engineers but by real users actually traveling - and we’ve seen several of these apps fall flat during updates from one version to another, or even just during regular use,” he says.

Edwards also says apps can be done for niche audiences, so long as the rate of return isn’t expected to come quickly. “We are looking at the revenue as a long-term investment in the company and our clients, as we design apps for a specialized segment of the professional marketplace and we do not expect big nor quick returns on our investment,” he says.

“The time to invest in mobile is now,” Kazez says, “but the case for particular apps really depends on the financials of the companies in question.”

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