[games_access] Apple iPods and Podcasting -- [cc] related issue

[hinn at uiuc.edu]

Hi everyone,

I was reading a news blurb on Apples upgraded iPods and 
iTunes and at the end of the blurb was this bit about a 
company, Blinkx, who is trying to open up closed captioning 
for podcasts. So off of the "games" topic but interesting 
none the less with regard to another "entertainment" field:

The quoted material below appears online at 
http://www.salon.com/tech/wire/2005/06/29/apple_upgrade/index
.html

"As Apple introduced its podcasting features, search company 
Blinkx Inc. was expected Wednesday to begin making podcasts 
and their video counterparts fully searchable using its 
speech-recognition software to transcribe and index feeds. 

Suranga Chandratillake, the company's founder and chief 
technology officer, said Tuesday the company's indexing 
software has identified about 20,000 channels of user-
generated audio and video, generating about 500 hours of 
programming a day. 

Search engines and podcast directories generally index audio 
and video by analyzing text that appears near the file or 
using humans to create summaries. Some also pull closed-
captioning transcripts from video programming, but user-
generated content generally carries no closed captioning. 

Chandratillake said Blinkx attempts to fill the gap by using 
speech-recognition softwre to transcript feeds when closed 
captioning is unavailable. It already indexes feeds, mostly 
video, from companies with which it has deals, including 
CNN, the British Broadcasting Corp. and Movielink LLC."