The Nielsen Company today reported overall online video usage and top online brands ranked by video streams for October 2009. Year-over-year, unique viewers, total streams, streams per viewer and time per viewer were up, led by a 26 percent growth in total streams.

What’s most interesting is who the number three provider of streaming video is (based on total number of streams). Of course, YouTube is number one; Hulu is number two; and number three is…?

That’s right, Facebook

The complete list can be accessed here.

On a Related Note: Time Spent Viewing Video on Social Networking Sites Up 98% Year-Over-Year In October

Source: Nielsen Wire

Current methods of searching audiovisual content can be a hit-and-miss affair. Manually tagging online media content is time consuming, and costly. But new ‘query by example’ methods, built on peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures, could provide the way forward for such data-intensive content searches, say European researchers.

A team of researchers have turned to peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, in which data is distributed and shared directly between computers, to power potent yet data intensive audiovisual search technology. The technique, known as query by example, uses content, rather than text, to search for similar content, providing more accurate search results and reducing or even eliminating the need for pictures, videos and audio recordings to be laboriously annotated manually. However, effectively implementing content-based search on a large scale requires a fundamentally different approach to the text-based search technology running on the centralised systems of the likes of Google, Yahoo and MSN.

“Because we’re dealing with images, video and audio, content-based search is very data intensive. Comparing two images is not a problem, but comparing hundreds of thousands of images is not practical using a centralised system,” says Yosi Mass, an expert on audiovisual search technology at IBM Research in Haifa, Israel. “A P2P architecture offers a scalable solution by distributing the data across different peers in a network and ensuring there is no central point of failure.”

Access the Complete Article

Source: ICT Results

It allows the user to upload an image, enter an image URL, draw a picture (cool!), or keyword search a database of the GazoPa database and then find SIMILAR images based on the image that was upload or keyword search. You can also combine an image (what they call a “key image”) with keyword(s). A Firefox addon, a bookmarklet, and an iPhone app are also available. GazoPa is not exactly new (their blog goes back to September, 2008) but it’s new to us. So, why not share. Their colorful logo might remind some of other search engines with colorful logos. (-:

The home page also claims the database is large, more that 60 million images. We need to confirm this but the way we read the final page of the FAQ is that the 60 million images were crawled by GazoPa. They also have a page for webmasters about their crawler, GazoPabot. In other words, they’re not buying their image collection by stringing together other image databases they’ve been given access to for free or a fee.

Results pages offer four types of results:

+ Images
+ Videos (it appears that most of the results come from YouTube)
+ News Images (it appears to be a GazoPa crawl)
+ Flickr (Is the Flickr database included in the 60 million images total?)

Worth mentioning, GozaPa is a venture project of the Hitachi Corporation (note the copyright info at the bottom of the home page).

So, go forward and demo. We’ll do the same and report back in a week or so.

See Also: GazoPa Blog

See Also: GazoPa Twitter Feed

See Also: A little over a week ago we posted about a reverse image search named Tin Eye. tool has users upload an image and then the Tin Eye technology goes out on the web to see if others are using your content.

This afternoon more new/updated from Bing.

Bing Video is MSN Video meeting Bing Search. You can find Bing Video here (it’s also accessible via a link on Bing.com). The database is searchable. Remember, you’ll be searching metadata and not the transcript of the program. The home page also includes content from several video categories. For example, you might see “most watched video.”

In the left column, you can begin your search by narrowing (without entering any search terms) to tv shows, music, most watched, news, and sports.

Bing Video continues to offer the very cool and very useful preview feature where you simply place your cursor on top of the video thumbnail and several seconds of the video plays. No clicks required.

A search results page allows you to limit your results by length, screen type, resolution, and source. Look for these options in the far left column. If available, you’ll also find related videos here. Finally, like you see elsewhere on Bing, links to other Bing services (based on your search terms) are listed here.

If you look at the source list, Bing Video is aggregating content from:
+ MSN
+ AOL Video
+ MTV
+ Hulu
+ ESPN
+ YouTube
+ MySpace
and other sources like the USA Today.

From the blog post we learn:
+ At the present time Bing Video contains over 900 television shows
+ Sharing video has been made easier
+ An option with some videos to “dim the lights” to make viewing the content easier.

One thing we would like to know is how much content Bing is getting from their content sources? In other words, do the have the full hulu catalog? Every YouTube video? If they only offer limited content, who makes the call as to what is and is not included.

Source: Bing Blog.

See Also: For a Comprehensive Database of Television Shows Available on the Web, Take a Look at Clicker. It’s a private beta but it’s worth your time to register.

Most video search technologies currently rely on semantic annotation in which videos have to be manually tagged with keywords so they can be found via a text-based search. As most YouTube users will attest, tagging one or two videos in this way is not particularly problematic. However, manually annotating thousands of clips, as content providers and media libraries regularly do, can be extremely time consuming and costly.

A faster alternative is to use software to automatically extract snippets of a video and create a unique identifier based on a variety of audiovisual features, such as scene, motion and music changes. These so-called digital media fingerprints can then be used to index and search full audio/video content. The technology works well for uncompressed, raw audio and video, but it has not been used effectively with the far more common, space-saving compressed files that stream from websites, are stored in media libraries or are broadcast by TV stations. Until now, that is.

“We wanted to develop a way of indexing and searching compressed video files quickly and easily regardless of their compression format or how or where they are stored,” says Nick Achilleopoulos who oversaw development of the technology as manager of the EU-funded DIVAS project.

To achieve that goal, the DIVAS researchers developed two advanced software engines: one to create fingerprints from compressed audio and/or video and another to use these unique identifiers to carry out content-based searches of audiovisual material.

Much More in the Complete Article

Source: ICT Results

From the Web Site:

Open Images is an open media platform that offers online access to a selection of audiovisual archive material to stimulate creative reuse.

As part of Images for the Future, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and Knowledgeland are developing Open Images. [Our emphasis] The aim of this project is to offer online access to a selection of archive material to stimulate creative reuse. Reuse includes remixing of archive footage in new videos. Open Images also supports interlinking with other data sources (like Wikipedia), allowing the easy creation of mashups. Access to the content will be based on the Creative Commons model, which proposes a middle way to rights management, rather than the extremes of the pure public domain or the reservation of all rights. The ‘open’ nature of the project is underscored by adapting open formats and using open source software for its infrastructure. Software resulting from Open Images will also be released under an open source license.

The Media Page

At the present time, 371 films are available. Look for images and audio to be added going forward. The database offers numerous ways to find what you’re looking for.

For example you can search by:
+ Keyword
+ User
+ Source
+ Length
+ Language
+ License.

You can refine results by the same criteria.

An API is also available (Documentation is in Dutch).

Source: Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and Knowledgeland
Hat Tip: AMIA News Briefs

From a Reuters Article:

The Sweden-based startup Spotify, launched for public access in October 2008, has momentum like no other digital music service of the last six years. It offers on-demand music streaming, in both free and premium services, and now claims to have more than 6 million users in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the United Kingdom, France and Spain. At one point it reported signing up new members at a rate of 50,000 per day, although that figure has fallen since September, when the service restricted its free version to invited guests in the United Kingdom.

Spotify has won high marks from reviewers for the ease with which it provides access to a catalog of more than 6 million tracks from majors and indies alike and the unobtrusive way it delivers advertising.

Access the Spotify Features Page to Get an Idea of What’s Available

Access the Complete Reuters Article

Source: Reuters

Music in the USA
Here are three of a growing number of services available in the U.S.

See Also: Pandora Music Service (Free and Fee-Based Accounts)

See Also: Slacker (Free and Fee-Based Accounts)

See Also: lala (Free to Listen Online, Pay to Purchase Individual Tracks)

…we’ve noticed that many of you are often wondering when new episodes will be available. After a lot of work with our content providers, our product and design team, and our content team, we decided to create a page that contains a schedule of what’s to come for the week ahead.

Access the “Coming Soon” Page

Along with the schedule, there are a few new features that will help you manage your Hulu viewing. If you’re a registered user, you can request an email notification to alert you when a particular video has been added to Hulu.com. We’ll also alert you on the rare occasion when that video is late in getting up on Hulu.com. For bloggers and editors, you can also grab the code to pre-embed the video to your blog. (An example is pasted below.) We will swap in the video as soon as it’s available on our site, so you’re free to post your article on your own schedule.

Source: Hulu Blog

But while there is a phenomenal amount of content, most of it is not that easy to find. Sure, text content can be skimmed or glanced, but audiovisual content has to be viewed in linear time. We cannot easily search inside a film or audio recording for relevant information.

That is changing, and one European project has created the first integrated platform for semantic search that can return results based on the content and context of film and audio files, as well as text.

But European researchers in the MESH project have developed an integrated platform which they say, for the first time, can combine semantic search – or search by the meaning of the words – and a host of associated tools to deliver more relevant information, from a wide variety of sources that can be accessed from an individual user.

[Snip]

These technologies are becoming common in particular knowledge domains, and more are emerging every day, but most relate to the concepts behind text-based documents. The MESH platform sought to use semantic search for every type of media.

On the way, it created some cutting-edge technology. “Our automatic annotation for video, for example, is state of the art,” explains Pedro Concejero, coordinator of the MESH project.

“The annotation system is capable of identifying the general scene setting, such as whether a video is a studio shot or a shot recorded on location. With adequate training, it can also detect (within some error margins) the general topic of the video, such as a scene about an earthquake or a flood. It can also find a number of salient objects within the scene, such as persons or fire, but cannot yet identify consistently objects with great variations in shape or aspect.”

One of the major challenges of the project was a product of its own success: It annotated too much information!

Much More fiin the Complete Report.

We will post Part II as soon as it become available.

See Also: MESH Project Home Page
Several videos are available.

Source: ICT Results

First, real estate listings are now more visible in Google Maps with the new real estate “layer”. To access the listings, click the “More” button at the top of a map (near the satellite imagery or terrain maps buttons) and select real estate. Immediately, the listings become visible on the map. Click any red “pin” and you’ll see the address, get driving directions, etc. Click the “more info” link to see all the information about the property. Here’s a view of properties for the Zip Code 90210. Now you can zoom in and out and move the around the maps like you’ve always done.

Also, note the listings located on the left side of the page. Here, you can find basic info about each property and find a link to click and get all the available info. You can also refine your results here by:

+ Price Range
+ Listing Type
+ Number of Bedrooms
+ Number of Bathrooms
+ Area Range (in Square Feet)

It’s possible to only search to real estate listings by selecting “Real Estate” in the drop down menu located next to the search box at the top of the page.

Next, Matt introduces the new, improved, and enhanced Google Music Search. Google has offered a music “one box” located at the top of a results page for since December, 2005. Here’s an article that Gary wrote about music search at that time.

This is a major enhancement to the music search.

Matt writes:

According to today’s announcement [this story and news release are from late Wednesday afternoon], searches for the name of an artist, album, or song will show the new OneBox in Google’s main search results.* If you search for an artist or album name, the OneBox will include a set of four songs that are chosen algorithmically by the partner music site*, not by Google. Each song will be linked to an audio clip that will play in a Flash-based pop-up window provided by the partner site. In some cases, the partner may provide one full play of the song before defaulting to a 30-second preview.

Matt points out that the rumors about Google selling music are not true (at least for now).

Google’s RJ Pittman told us today that, while some of their music partners have a commerce element, the focus of Google’s new music search is information, not selling digital songs. In fact, there’s no commercial arrangement at all, we’re told, between Google and the music partner sites included in this launch.

Finally, the article correctly notes that Yahoo Music has been available for years and they
continue to offer music info and the ability to preview music/watch videos, link to the official site, get lyrics, photos, videos, etc. from a box at the top of web pages when a group or solo artist triggers the database.

He also points out (this is cool) that in some cases, if you enter song lyrics into the search box, youll get back the song info as a “one box” result. Here’s an example.

Speaking of song lyrics, a few weeks ago we posted about a searchable song lyric service, LyricWiki, being acquired by Wikia, an online community of wikis and content hubs that was started by Wikipedia co-founder, Jimmy Wales.

* Partners include: MySpace, Pandora, Lala, imeem, and Rhapsody.

Source: Search Engine Land

+ Creative Commons

+ EveryStockPhoto

+ Flickr

+ Internet Archive: Audio

+ Internet Archive: Movies

+ Wikimedia Commons

+ Yahoo Creative Commons Search

Source: CNET

See Also: This Page from USA.gov Offers Direct Links to Imagery from Various Government Agencies, Most of it Public Domain Content

See Also: Most of the Imagery in this NASA Database (a Joint Venture between NASA and the Internet Archive) is in the Public Domain

Whatever site you choose, make sure to read the terms of use.

Some three years later, the archive is still online and now home to over 1300 events, exclusive Q&A sessions, and student produced pieces on politics, policy, culture, and academic life. However, it has a new URL. You can now find the archive here. It’s keyword searchable and you can limit your search to a specific year (1978-Present). Also, if you want to see all of the video available from a certain year, leave the search box empty, select a year and then then enter (or the “go” button next to the search box).

For example, here’s a speech by Rev. Desmond Tutu (1986) and an address by Representative John Lewis (D-GA) from 2008.

They also do a nice job of keeping the database up to date. Here’s anaddress by Newt Gingrich from last week (October 8th).

Source: Harvard University Institute of Politics

From the Report:

The Nielsen Company today reported overall online video usage and top online brands ranked by video streams for September 2009. Year-over-year, unique viewers, total streams, streams per viewer and time per viewer were up, led by 25 percent growths in total streams and time per viewer.

The post contains two charts:

1) Overall Online Video Usage (U.S.) for September, 2009; Year-Over-Year; Month-Over-Month

2) Top Online Brands ranked by Video Streams for September 2009 (U.S.)
The Top 10 are listed. Stats include total streams and unique viewers.

Top 5
1) YouTube
2) Hulu
3) Yahoo
4) MSN/WindowsLive/Bing
5) Fox Interactive Media
and at number 10 is Facebook.

Source: nilesenwire

Today the Anne Frank House is launching the official Anne Frank Channel on YouTube containing existing and new images about Anne Frank. These include excerpts from interviews with Otto Frank and witnesses like Miep Gies, as well as [our emphasis] previews of the virtual museum of the Anne Frank House, soon to be opened to the public. With the Anne Frank Channel on YouTube, people around the world will be able to explore the life and significance of Anne Frank through unique images.

The channel opens with the only existing film footage of Anne Frank, made during the wedding of her neighbor on 22 July 1941. In another film, Nelson Mandela talks about the strength he derived from Anne Frank’s diary during his imprisonment on Robben Island. The channel will also contain a series of new interviews with people who knew Anne Frank personally.

And there’s more. On YouTube, visitors can follow the development of the virtual museum, which will soon enable people to visit the Anne Frank House online. Visitors can watch the ‘making of’ the online secret annex in 3D. The virtual museum will be launched on 28 April 2010 as part of the 50-year anniversary celebrations of the Anne Frank House museum.

Access the Official Anne Frank YouTube Channel

Source: Anne Frank Museum
Hat Tip: Library Stuff

August 2009 data from the comScore Video Metrix service, showing that 161 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during the month, the largest audience ever recorded. Online video reached another all-time high in August with more than 25 billion videos viewed during the month, with Google Sites accounting for more than 10 billion.

Google Sites continued to rank as the top U.S. video property in August as it surpassed the 10 billion videos viewed threshold, representing 40 percent of all videos viewed online. YouTube.com accounted for 99 percent of all videos viewed at the Google Sites property. Microsoft Sites ranked second with 547 million (2.2 percent) followed by Viacom Digital with 539 million videos viewed (2.1 percent) and Hulu with 488 million (1.9 percent).

More than 161 million viewers watched an average of 157 videos per viewer during the month of August. Google Sites attracted 121.4 million unique viewers during the month (82.8 videos per viewer), followed by Microsoft Sites with 54.9 million viewers (10 videos per viewer) and Yahoo! Sites with 51.6 million viewers (6.9 videos per viewer).

Other Facts from the Report:

+ 81.6 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.

+ The average online video viewer watched 582 minutes of video, or 9.7 hours.

+ 120.5 million viewers watched nearly 10 billion videos on YouTube.com (82.6 videos per viewer).

+ 44.9 million viewers watched 340 million videos on MySpace.com (7.6 videos per viewer).

+ The average Hulu viewer watched 12.7 videos, totaling 1 hour and 17 minutes of videos per viewer.

+ The duration of the average online video was 3.7 minutes.

Source: comScore

See Also: Looking for a Directory of High Quality Online Video? Take a Look at Clicker. You’ll First Need to Register for the Beta (It’s Fast and Free).

From the Site:

Marketing is in the midst of a complex transformation. As consumers become more technologically sophisticated and choices multiply, marketing must adapt. Tune in to viewpoints from industry and academic thought leaders to acquire inspiring, empowering and actionable insights.

Google and The Wharton School have partnered to gather and provide quick perspective on managing the change in the marketing landscape. As we explore what will define success through marketing’s continual evolution, we aim to share ideas and lessons learned to help keep us all better informed and effective as the game – and conversation – rapidly progresses.

Categories of Content Include:

+ Videos (Browse by All, Latest, Theme, Individual, Company)
Clips from people at companies including Google, The New York Times, and SocialMedia.com.

+ Trends (via The Barometer)

Using Google search data and other public data sources, The Barometer offers perspectives on a variety of telling consumer trends.

+ The Future of Advertising

+ Free Tools (Primarily from Google); You’ll also find links to access Twitter Trends and Facebook Lexicon.

Access Fast Forward

Source: Wharton School of Business, Google

blinkx today announced a new partnership with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Canada’s national public radio and television broadcast network. Clips from the station’s online video library are now easily available at www.blinkx.com.

Established in 1936, CBC is national public broadcaster, delivering a diverse range of Entertainment, News, Sports, and Documentary content across multiple platforms to Canadians from coast to coast. From movie reviews and decorating tips to news clips and vintage archive footage, visitors to www.blinkx.com will now have countless hours of this exclusive collection of Canadian programming at their fingertips.

Access Blinkx

Note: At the time of posting this item (9/22, 2am EDST) it appears that CBC content has not yet flowed into the database. Stay tuned.

Source: Media Release

The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation has launched EmmyTVLegends.org, a new web video portal offering free, public access to the Archive of American Television, the most comprehensive videotaped interview collection of its kind. It features revealing conversations with more than 600 influential figures [2000+ hours] that have shaped the television industry from its inception to present day, and includes little-known anecdotes, unique perspectives, and eyewitness accounts from top names in TV.

This ambitious, new website has been more than a decade in the making. Since 1996, the Archive has conducted in-depth interviews with television’s biggest
stars, industry legends, and crucial behind-the-scenes players who make television magic. In 2005, the Archive began to release the interviews online
to the public, but until now there was no easy way to search and navigate the footage.

Access EmmyTVLegends.org
Advanced Search Interface

Much more in the complete announcement.

Source: Reuters
Hat Tip: AMIA Newsbriefs

From TechCrunch:

While there are no shortage of video search engines out there, Clicker believes its offering is superior because it creates a structured database of programming, organizing shows by things like network, genre, and show name. This type of data not only allows for better search results, but it allows you to browse content without having to do text-based searches, which you probably won’t be doing when television and future web-enabled tablets start to serve up this content. Clicker already has a deal with Boxee.

The goal is really to be the best search engine for video content. Clicker will point you in the direction of whatever you are looking for (and will do embeds if they’re available), but won’t serve up the videos themselves. They will also delve into surfacing content not explicitly produced for television, but is still high quality web video content. But they don’t want to be YouTube, which is cluttered with user-generated content. Clicker is going for a different market.

From the Clicker Blog:

Clicker aims to provide the most comprehensive, unbiased and user-friendly way to navigate what’s available (and just as importantly, what’s not) to watch online, where and when you can find it, and finally, what’s worth watching amongst your infinite choices. We have made it our mission to make it dead simple for you to find the RIGHT SHOW, RIGHT NOW.

To accomplish this, Clicker is a hybrid of many other kinds of information and entertainment sites: one part directory, one part search engine, one part Wiki, one part entertainment guide, and one part DVR. At the heart of it all is a massive structured database, created by a team of people from search, media, data and content management backgrounds.

From day one, Clicker has mapped more than 300,000 episodes, from over 5,200 shows, from over 1,200 networks – in addition to 1,200 movies (soon to be 14,000 movies with the addition of Netflix), and 50,000 music videos from 20,000 artists. All of this programming is organized by episode, show, network, media type, title, and artist, as well as over 1,000 categories and sub-categories.

Source: Clicker Blog / TechCrunch

UPDATE: See Also: Clicker: More Than Just A Video Search Engine (via SEL)

These new images [and video] are just a few minutes among hundreds of hours of amateur video and images being collected by the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center which has launched a website containing examples of citizen journalism of the tragedy.

According to today’s press release the museum has issued a world-wide invitation for the public to submit media related to the 9/11 events through a new online initiative “Make History.” 911History.org will become a permanent digital archive and help build an interactive, mapped time line of events on the web.

[Snip]

Each photo will be placed alongside current Google “Street View” photos of various locations. Users can click on locations, themes or time of day to view the footage or images from the locations they were actually taken reports Sky News.

Source: Digital Journal

Access National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center (Home Page)

A Few Web-Based Resources to Assist in Remembering the Tragedy of September 11, 2001

+ September11.Archive.Org (via Internet Archive)

+ September 11 Television Archive (via Internet Archive)

+ September 11 Digital Archive (Center for History and New Media and American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning)

+ Remembering 9/11 (Library of Congress)

+ America Transformed (NPR)
NPR Coverage Sept. 11 – Oct. 8, 2001. Includes audio archives.

+ Voices of Reflection National Public Radio 9/11 Coverage
From September 11, 2002.

+ Audio: Understanding America A Year After 9/11 (Minnesota Public Radio)

+ The Sonic Memorial Project

+ Audio: Commission Hearings (via NPR)

+ 9/11 Commission Web Site

+ 9/11 Commission Records (via National Archives and Records Administration)

See Also: 9/11 National Day of Service and Remembrance
What you can do.