Keyword Search TV Programs with Hulu Labs (Beta) Caption Search; New Visualization Tool Also Released
This is big news and it also happens to be very cool. Finally, keyword search of video transcripts is becoming mainstream.
You can now keyword search captioning transcripts (generated from the closed captioning) for thousands of shows in the Hulu database and then go directly to the specific part(s) of a program where those words were spoken.
This page has a complete intro to the service. Here are a few highlights.
You can initiate a captions search from the Hulu Labs page [here you can search captioning from multiple programs] for the feature, but the more permanent home for captions search is in the new Captions tab on any show or video page for any program with captions.
Personally, we find both interfaces useful. Sometimes you want to search a specific program but at other times you want to search the entire database.
Here's what a caption search for the word "Google" via the "Labs interface" looks like. Caveat: Not every program in the Hulu database is searchable and note how variations of the word Google appear in the results.
If you just want a quick preview of the search result, hover your mouse cursor over the image and a short segment of video around the search term will play in the thumbnail. To see it at full size, click on the search result text and we’ll send you to that spot in the full-size video.
One bonus that comes with caption search is what we’re calling the heat map. This is a visual graph of the user interest throughout the span of a video and is available on any captioned video that has accumulated enough user views. It appears at the top of the captions tab for those videos. We analyze a variety of viewer behaviors to generate the heat map.
Services including Blinkx and TVEyes (fee-based, 24 hours of programming for many stations around the U.S., the focus here is news) use a combination of speech-to-text and caption search. In January, when 2005 Google launched a Google Video beta, it included closed-captioning search.
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