While Web media outlets grappled with the logistics of cybercasting President Clinton's videotaped grand jury testimony, engineers at AltaVista were quietly prepping a surprise. By Monday night, the search engine had unleashed a searchable version of the video for its Web site.
"Our technology allow users to interact with video in the same way as they have with text," said Carlos Montalvo, spokesman for Virage. The private San Mateo, California, company last year created the technology underlying the video search engine.
Visitors to the AltaVista site can input a phrase or keyword -- such as "semen" or "improper relationship" -- and view only the video segments associated with those words.
The Virage technology works by converting real-time video into a data type, such as HTML, that can be searched over the Web. Users can then navigate through the video and go directly to the exact point of interest, rather than streaming it from start to finish.
Typically, the Virage engine is used to catalog videos for Intranets and other internal corporate computing environments, but the company recently updated the product to better integrate with Web-based applications and formats.
"The Web is the de facto repository for the world's media, and we can use all the mature technologies to begin applying it to video the same way as text and images," said Montalvo.
The "metadata," or data about data, collected from videos can be captured and translated into a variety of formats, including HTML and XML. Licensees of the technology include ABC News, British Broadcasting Corporation, Canon, CBS News, CNN, General Motors, Lucent, and US government agencies.
