AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

The Los Angeles Times

The Internet certainly beats conventional TV when it comes to the quantity of video offered. Finding something worth watching is another matter. TiVo and Digeo’s Moxi set the gold standard for TV program guides; their EPGs make it easy to sift through thousands of hours of programming to find something appealing. I haven’t seen anything that’s quite so useful for video online, but elements of an online program guide are emerging around the Net. Most take the form of media players with channels of aggregated content combined with the ability to find and retrieve programs, such as VeohTV, Miro and the recently released Adobe Media Player. There also are standalone indexes, such as OVGuide and new entrant Modern Feed.

The basic challenge when it comes to developing a guide to online video is the lack of metadata. The companies that supply data for TV program guides (among them Tribune, which owns this blog) include leading actors’ names, plot summaries, genres and other information that can help viewers winnow the listings down to subsets they might be interested in. The same kind of information might be available for many online videos, but not in a standardized way. So developers of online video guides have a hard time creating indexes that can, say, list cooking shows on the Net (or, better yet, all the cooking-related shows and segments of shows), Westerns or detective shows.

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