On my TV there's more than 100 channels... but what's on? It'd be handy to search the TV channels like I can search the internet and maybe scan the subtitles for keywords. I know, I know I could look on teletext but it's such a drag...-- lubbit, Sep 20 2003 Baked http://news.bbc.co....hnology/4205267.stm [lubbit, Jan 26 2005] (direct link to service referred to above) http://video.google.com [krelnik, Jan 26 2005] Digital cable and satellite already lets you search 100's of channels worth of show titles.-- Cedar Park, Sep 21 2003 Searching the listings, with google or manually, is for chumps. Get a DVR (Tivo, ReplayTV, etc) and it will gather the shows you want for you automatically.-- krelnik, Sep 21 2003 Thank you fogfreak. I'm just thinking how easy it is to find stuff on google compared to teletext or TV guide. Oh oh oh, the pop-up (ad) blockers & Page Rank feature would be sweet too. Sorry, no idea how to do it - it's all magic to me - but it's all out there...-- lubbit, Sep 21 2003 Actually, this is already baked, right on the web. There are a number of web sites where you can log in, teach it what channels you have on your TV, and then use that web site to search the listings and so on. Google on "tv program listings" and you'll come up with several, including Zap2It, TVGuide and so on.-- krelnik, Sep 21 2003 Yeah, but that only searches the *listings*. This would search the *subtitles*, that is, an approximation of the actual programme. That's actually pretty cool. I'd imagine you'd have a bunch of queries stored in your set, and if anything about, say, "halfbakery" is spoken anywhere, your tivo-on-steroids keeps the last five minutes and indicates that there's something of interest on channel XYZ.-- jutta, Jun 03 2004 Admittedly that would be cool, but a bitch to implement. You'd have to have an active tuner for all of the channels at once, in order to extract the subtitle information.-- krelnik, Jun 04 2004 Nowadays so much of the interesting stuff is live and doesn't get subtitiles. Perhaps we should add OCR to the software which builds the TV Google DB. This way the live 24 news channels could be added to the results. [Krelnik] is right though for this to happen the tuner would need be the "all seeing eye" of TV. But assuming that you used cable this could act as a separate interactive service run from the central control via some smart stuff. Not sure how well the interactive element works on Satelitte reception though.-- PainOCommonSense, Jun 04 2004 Ahem (link). <waits for applause>-- lubbit, Jan 26 2005 Another of the many ideas where someone on the halfbakery anticipated the actual invention by quite some time. Nice.-- krelnik, Jan 26 2005 (applause)-- Worldgineer, Jan 26 2005 i mentally awarded Google a bun earlier today when I saw their video google page. Brilliant.
However, I've just rescinded it and awarded it to [lubbit] instead for pre- empting Google by over a year.
Is [lubbit] a googlemployee?-- jonthegeologist, Jan 26 2005 I hear he's not. I wonder if google patented the idea? If so, you'll be seeing me on Judge Judy.
Has anyone got any stories about companies patenting stuff then finding it's "public domain" on the internet? Be fun to hear.-- lubbit, Jan 27 2005 random, halfbakery