‘Future of TV’ Seminar Examines Search

Another big talking point at yesterday’s MediaTel Group seminar on the ‘Future of TV’ was search, with panellist Paul Cleghorn, of Tape It Off The Internet (TIOTI), making reference to the Long Tail when he said that old programmes might have value, but that value will remain untapped unless these shows can be found.

TIOTI is an online service intended to make it easy to find, share and discover TV shows. It aggregates content within a social experience, indexing the available shows from online destinations and presenting all these viewing options in one place (see Next Generation Of Online TV To Launch).

Cleghorn said that the a number of factors can make a difference when searching for content, with the quality of the metadata – descriptive data about content, such as program title or director’s name, etc – very important.

He added that another valuable search tool is signposting, whether that be by genre or other methods of navigating.

In addition, said Cleghorn, user recommendations can also be invaluable when viewers are searching for content, something TIOTI uses to great effect.

Peter Cowley, managing director of digital media at Endemol UK, also on the panel, said that it was excellent news that any new programmes the BBC now makes must be tagged with metadata by producers.

“Once you build up that database of who was involved in a programme and match it against the programme, that’s when what we can do becomes limitless in terms of what we can do – when the digitisation gets matched up with metadata,” said Cowley.

Of course, if people are searching for content online, it would help if all that content was in one place, and panellist Rahul Chakkara, controller of BBCi, made the admission that as far as digital is concerned, going to different places to download content “doesn’t make sense” – which just serves to emphasise the value of aggregators such as TIOTI.

MediaTel Group: 0207 439 7575 www.mediatelgroup.co.uk