Keep an eye on Yahoo! making a run up the inside against Google. In this interesting article by Josh McHugh from Wired we take a look at how the former search engine is making headway in the battle to be the one that controls the burgeoning video distribution and search market that's only a year away from exploding.
Returning home after a vacation in 2004, Andy Volk dumped his luggage in the hallway and settled into an armchair for an evening of his favorite shows: The Simpsons, Futurama, and The Streets of San Francisco. But when he called up the Now Playing menu on his TiVo, he discovered a couple of things he'd never seen next to the usual items. A friend who'd been house-sitting had loaded the DVR with a whole new world of television. At the top of the list was Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, something Volk, a product manager at Yahoo!, had never considered watching. He pushed Play. And he loved it.
Every so often, Volk would find that his TiVo had recorded another obscure gem. He told the story to his boss, Bradley Horowitz, senior director of Yahoo!'s Technology Development Group, and suggested that Yahoo!'s video search technology, then in the early stages of development, needed a house sitter of its own. Horowitz had to laugh. Since his days as a grad student at the MIT Media Lab, he'd been trying to develop a machine-based version of Volk's houseguest. If only a computer could grasp the appeal of a 1965 vampire fest.
Amen to that.
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