The BBC made use of semantic video annotation in its coverage of the 2012 Olympics

It’s fair to say that an good idea has finally “arrived” when it has left the realm of the theoretical and has become the foundation of a lot of popular tools, services, and applications.

That is surely the case with Semantic Video.

Gone are the days when internet video could best be described as a meaningless blob of content invisible to search and impossible to annotate and reuse in meaningful ways.

The past year has seen an explosion of practical (and popular) services and applications that are based upon the extraction of meaningful metadata– and often linked data– from video content.

For those of us lucky enough to view it, the BBC wowed us last July with its Olympic Coverage, broadcasting live every event of the Olympics on 24 HD streams, all accessible over the internet, with live, dynamic data and statistics on athletes.  To pull off this feat, the BBC used a custom-designed Dynamic Semantic Publishing platform which included fluid Operations’ Information Workbench to help author, curate and publish  ontology and instance data.

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Julianne Pepitone of CNN Money reports, “The social TV space has been percolating for the past year or two, and its first big merger is here: startup GetGlue has been acquired by lesser-known Viggle. Viggle will buy GetGlue for $25 million in cash and about 48.3 million shares of the company’s publicly traded stock, worth around $53 million at Friday’s closing price. Viggle will run both brands and continue to employ GetGlue’s 34 employees. GetGlue founder and CEO Alex Iskold will take a senior executive position and a board seat at Viggle. Social TV software — also known as “second screen” apps or even the clunky phrase “simultaneous viewing” tools — taps into TV viewers’ use of mobile devices while they watch their favorite shows. More than a dozen startups have popped up to take advantage of the trend, with each platform taking a slightly different approach.” Read more