Adobe Wants to Reshape Online Video

Adobe

What may have gone largely unnoticed in Adobe’s announcement last week that it would be making its Flash video format available for the TV screen, is another important initiative: making video easier to use for consumers.

Today, the content within an online video cannot be searched. Unless someone manually inserts keyword metadata, there is no way to find a particular part of a clip or to fast forward to a certain spot.

At the National Association of Broadcasters convention last week, Adobe showed a beta version of a tool that would automate that process. Adobe Story, a new application now in private testing and scheduled to be released next year, will ingest a movie script and automatically break it down by character, key lines and interactions.

With the metadata paired to the footage, consumers will theoretically be able to search, then view just certain sections or specific dialogue in Web-based videos. A user could follow key lines in a movie, or just one specific character’s interactions and scenes.

If the technology works, (content creators will get to play with a beta version of Adobe Story later this year), Flash-based video could become as easy to search as a text-based Web site.

“Unlike HTML code used on Web sites and found by search engines, rich media today is opaque,” said Mark Randall, chief strategist of the company’s dynamic media group. “We want to make it more discoverable.”

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“Today, the content within an online video cannot be searched. Unless someone manually inserts keyword metadata, there’s no way to find a particular part of a clip or to fast forward to a certain spot.”

Hi Eric, it’s actually already possible to automate the use of speech-to-text metadata today, via Adobe Production Premium CS4 and the ActionScript Extensible Metadata library on Adobe Labs:
//blogs.adobe.com/gunar/2009/01/xmp_library_for_actionscript_on_labs_1.html

It’s not in mainstream release yet, but the work on Labs is going well, so there’s hope for the future.

(The Adobe Story project is very interesting for production crews, because it allows metadata about scenes, properties, rights and more to remain attached to footage, all throughout the production and even out to public distribution. This metadata could indeed naturally include the script. Lots of room still for new abilities with video!)

jd/adobe

Eric,

This has been attempted by many companies to varying degrees of success including Virage, Mediaware Solutions, IBM, etc. The floor at NAB is littered with start-ups from the 90s selling auto indexing capabilities and Contnent-based Search products.

It’ll be interesting to see if Adobe gets it done well enough to actually turn a profit.

David

“Adobe Story, a new application now in private testing and scheduled to be released next year, will ingest a movie script and automatically break it down by character, key lines and interactions”

So this means that you still need a script. Consequently, 99.99% (if not more) of online flash videos disqualify for this software. It might be useful for TV series and movies but seeing that the major cable networks and movie studios rather fight legal battles than create a new internet based business model, it seems unlikely this will be utilized in any productive way.

People who want to enable viewers to go directly to a specific spot within a video or audio, or who want to expose those “bookmarks” to search engines to improve access and search engine rankings, or even view related scenes across videos or audios as a “virtual video,” can do that today with a commercially available solution that is used by large organizations such as Astra-Zeneca, Bearing Point and the Fallon Group, and many others. Check it out at //www.veotag.com. Note that the free viewer you see there only shows a fraction of what they can do.

I’m not sure where you are getting your info from Eric, but this statement is inherently false

“Today, the content within an online video cannot be searched. Unless someone manually inserts keyword metadata, there is no way to find a particular part of a clip or to fast forward to a certain spot.”

Many websites (not nytimes.com) are already using features like speech-to-text and search within a video to do exactly what you said cannot be done. Go to Foxnews.com, or NY Times sister site Boston.com and search for anything and the search results will include the spoken word in a video clip.

Adobe launch his new PDF Portfolio ‘Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro’. A very useful tool. See more on //www.111download.com/product/adobe-acrobat-9-pro.html

Regarding David Knightley’s comment, it seems to me as though this is less about adding to Adobe’s profitability, and more about differentiating Flash Player (for delivery) and the Creative Suite (for Production) from the likes of Silverlight/Quicktime and Final Cut/Avid.

The Adobe approach seems to be entice the creatives by providing a set of tools integrated from end-to-end and this just extends their reach in the video pro workflow on step earlier in the ingestion of scripts and one step later in the searchability of the end product.