BBC and IBM develop video search

The BBC has signed a ‘strategic alliance’ with IBM to create a state of the art image/video search engine for its CBeebies and CBBC childrens programmes.

This is the first in a planned series of projects.

The new multimedia search engine, based on a technology codenamed Marvel, will aim to improve user searches by visually analysing images and video across the broadcaster’s online TV content.

According to IBM, Marvel replaces costly, time-consuming, and error-prone processes of authoring metadata with a semantics machine learning approach. It works by building statistical models from visual features using the training examples and applies the models for automatically annotating large repositories.

“This alliance with IBM will offer new and genuinely innovative services to our audiences,” said Ashley Highfield, BBC director of Future Media & Technology.

“For example, combining the BBC's massive TV and radio archive with IBM's cutting-edge research into video and audio search technology should provide the means to unlocking huge latent value in our long tail of content.”

There are no details on when the Marvel-based engine will be up and running.

The BBC has also announced that it will be working with IBM partner, Siemens, to rollout a pilot of IBM’s Media Hub technology in order to test new business processes and ways for the BBC’s creative teams to work together.

See also:
BBC sets up YouTube channels
BitTorrent offers legal TV downloads