Former head of BBC News Online Bob Eggington has launched a video search engine called searchbbcvideo.com to allow users to scour the BBC archives for clips.
The company claims that the new site it does a better job of finding BBC videos than the corporation’s own online search tools.
Built by Eggington’s company, TV Genius, the video search engine works by trawling the BBC’s web presence and listing all the video items currently held on databases across the corporation’s various websites.
The search engine includes “the thousands of items which currently have no links to them and cannot be found using the BBC’s own search facility”.
The website was borne out of frustration. Eggington said:
“I’ve been frustrated for years now about the fact that there’s no way of finding the immense amount of online video that the BBC posts on its various websites.
“The BBC may only have about 27,000 videos on their site, but in terms of the content, it's a lot more compelling than the several millions on others.
“It’s much too rich an asset to lie unused and there is great demand for it. In my view the BBC has taken too long to create a way of letting users see the material. After all, the users paid for it."
Eggington says that the job of indexing BBC videos is an ongoing one: “I’m amazed at the total – and it’s growing every day. Our TV Genius editorial team checks the various BBC sites every night, updates the links and prioritises them, so that users will get the best results.”
He views the website as a temporary fix that may not have a long shelf life if the BBC sorts out its own video search functionality.
“One day the BBC will index its own video and make it searchable. Then I’ll be happy to close my site down. I’m not trying to monetise it – I’m just offering it as a public service that lets people find material that was previously inaccessible.”
Chris Lake is editor in chief at Econsultancy, entrepreneur and long-term internet fiend. Follow him on Twitter or connect via Linkedin.
Posted 03 November 2006 12:31pm by Chris Lake with 3 comments
Tags: Big Media, Startups, Video, TV, BBC
Topics: Content Management, Site Search & Merchandising
Sectors: Publishing, Media & Entertainment
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Graham Charlton
Online Advertising
Director at TV Genius Ltd
7:59AM on 6th November 2006
Thanks for your kind attention.
I don't want to be too defensive here, but the original post is not quite correct.
You've made a false comparison between the results returned by my own Search engine and the BBC's to the query "Ryder Cup". The BBC does indeed return many more results than my search - but most of those are audio, not video. Mine concentrates on the video.
But, as I've always said, the BBC search engine for News and Sport items is good - I built it. It's the other BBC video content that is not indexed or retrievable by Search, anywhere else but on www.searchbbcvideo.com
Bob Eggington
Editor in Chief at Econsultancy
11:49AM on 6th November 2006
Hi Bob,
Quite right - my mistake, it did include audio too. As such, I've deleted the example.
Thanks,
c.
5:28AM on 27th February 2008
one word: MPEG7.
it is a sad comment upon the pathetic state of bbc's own content management stategy, that metadata (and rich scene description languages built upon RDF metata) has been ignored so long.
but not to worry ...
i am sure that whatever sludge microsoft comes up with will be "good enough" for the mediocrities that run bbc media technology :-)
sigh.