Michael Dunn, CTO of Hearst Media has been quoted saying, “Video, in its native form, is a blob of content… and it’s hard to extract data from it.” Thankfully, semantic technologies are starting to take video “beyond the blob,” and that is precisely what panelists at the upcoming Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco will discuss.

The panel discussion Beyond the Blob: Semantic Video’s Coming of Age is set to begin at 2:25 on Monday, June 3 at SemTechBiz and will feature a panel of semantic web professionals with a broad range of experience regarding semantic video. The panel will be moderated by Kristen Milhollin, Project Lead & Founder of GoodSpeaks.org, an organization aimed at creating a nonprofit media and data distribution network that increases public awareness and support of the work done by nonprofit and other charitable organizations.  Read more

John Kennedy of Silicon Republic reports, “Ireland’s State broadcaster RTÉ, as part of its strategy to preserve the memories of a nation in digital form, is to collaborate with SFI’s recently announced mega CSET the Insight Centre to employ big data and the semantic web to make hundreds of thousands of hours of audio and video content available at the touch of a button. In a collaboration announced at the European Data Forum in Dublin this morning, RTÉ will work with the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in Galway and the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) to make sure that content going back over 60 years can be accessed digitally.” Read more

Andy Plesser of Beet.tv recently spoke to Stoke Young, Executive Producer of MSNBC.com regarding how MSNBC is increasing the searchability of their video content through semantic technologies. Plesser writes, “The notion of the ‘semantic web’ championed by the Web’s inventor Tim Berners-Lee and his W3C organization, involves the deep interconnection of text data.  For text-free video, however, this is a challenge, but it has been achieved by MSNBC.com through the creation and syndication of precise captions and other data surrounding news videos.” Read more

Behavioral Recognition Systems (BRS Labs) has been issued a US Patent for “the company’s unique artificial intelligence based technology that serves as the foundation for its AISight® 3.0 video surveillance software platform. This is one of a series of more than 60 related U.S. Patents that have either been granted, are pending, or are in process.”

BRS Labs President John Frazzini commented, “The video surveillance technology we have invented is distinctly and materially different from the simple recognition capabilities found in video analytics solutions currently available from a number of vendors in the physical security market… Read more

A recent article discusses the value of metadata in linking television content together, an important facet of a wider semantic relationship-building process. The article begins, “Today’s consumers want TV content not just in the web browser, but on smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles — you name it. However, for ‘TV Everywhere’ (TVE) to succeed, the industry cannot simply offer content on a multitude of devices — it must also ace the viewer’s search and discovery experience. Enter, metadata.” Read more