The Media Drop

Since late this afternoon I’ve been checking out TV Guide’s upcoming “Project Stingray,” which some of you might have heard about of late. The gist is that “Stingray” is TV Guide’s effort to provide a video search on the Internet, but with much more of a “legit” feel than what the search engines on sites such as YouTube or Vimeo (ed: apparently, no one has ever asked Vimeo to remove content from their site, sans Bank of America’s “One” song, natch) are sure to offer, as many a network and copyright holder is currently trying to pull their content from those sites. Additionally, those sites can be “manipulated” by people who add tags or content descriptions that aren’t on the up and up. By now, most of us who’ve searched on those sites have come across something once or twice that wasn’t what it was said to be up front.

As you can see by the screen/image in this post, a search for “Karl Rove” isn’t exactly coming up with video of Karl Rove doing a little bit of a dance as “MC Rove” at last night’s Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association dinner, which is the “hot” video of the moment for his name, so it’s not a perfect world. However, what “Stingray” does do is search the following:

A&E, ABC, Adult Swim, AMC, AOL Movies, AOL TV, Apple.com, BBC America, BET, Bravo, Brilliant But Cancelled, CBS, CinemaNOW, CNN Pipeline, Comedy Central, Court TV, CW, Disney Motion, E Online, Fox, Fox Reality, G4, Google Video, HBO, HGTV, IFILM, In2TV, iTunes, iVillage, Lifetime, MSN TV, MTV, mtvU Uber, National Geographic, NBC, Nickelodeon, Oxygen, Sci Fi, Showtime, SOAPNet, TBC, TCM, TNT, Trio, TV Land, USA, VH1 VSpot, Yahoo! Movies & Yahoo! TV

Clicking through on any video on the results page takes you to the page where that video is - at least in my spot checking so far, so it’s not as if TV Guide is having you watch the content anywhere embedded on its own site. Searching and using the “Grid” to show results shows a maximum of 12 results, with about every other page taking up two slots with an advertisement. Right now, I’m seeing a vertical ad for NBC’s “Heroes” on the Grid. Mousing over individual results pops up a little window that shows more information and allows you to add it to your Clip Collection, but dragging and dropping doesn’t seem to do anything. Using the “List” version of results shows six results per page, but shows you if the video is free or not (I haven’t found any for pay videos just yet, even with lots of music artist searches), and it also allows you to add the videos to your Clip Collection, which sits on the left-hand side for you to reference later. Every other page in the List style drops an ad for Coke in the lower right corner, in just about the same horizontal size as the various listings.

So far, my favorite part of the results is that you can “drill down” your results even further, so if you type something seriously generic, or you get hundreds of results, you can further search to see something (hopefully) closer to what you’re looking for. Overall, it seems to be indexing everything from full episodes of shows that networks are putting online down to interviews and other content that networks such as BET are putting online. Presumably this’ll become more important as more video is indexed, but for right now it’s most helpful when looking at individual providers, such as Adult Swim, when you’re looking for something specific. I was happy to note that within one try, I could find the “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” episode where Master Shake comes up with a new “Happy Birthday” song and owes Zakk Wylde some serious loot for participating in the recording of it. Additionally, the “drill down” options allow you to choose things by genre, show and length, which is pretty awesome.

Now obviously this isn’t the “holy grail” of video search just yet, as there’s too much of it out there that hasn’t been touched yet. But it’s most certainly not a weak effort by any means. While there is some “safety” in going with these known quantities, it does seem to show that you can take groups that aren’t organized “together” on one consistent platform and organize them in such a way that is actually useful to the end user. I give it an “A.”