Digitalsmiths Drives Microsoft Movies
Microsoft is showing off its new Silverlight Enhanced Movies at its CES booth, and part of what makes them successful is technology by Digitalsmiths. While Digitalsmiths doesn't have any major announcements of its own for this show, it's spending time with reporters and potential partners showing what it deep metadata service can do.
Digitalsmiths' strength is creating metadata for TV shows and movies, and it added live events to that lineup when it acquired Gotuit in November of 2010.
Through both automated and human-led systems, Digitalsmiths is able to create deep metadata for video, breaking down titles to show every appearance by an actor, the full text of the script, parts with violence or other adult content, sections with uncleared music, and many more categories. It's those capabilities that Microsoft taps for Paramount Silverlight Enhanced Movies available on Windows Phone 7. Viewers can focus on scenes with a particular actor, a particular song, or even send a favorite clip to a friend.
Digitalsmiths already works with many major premium content companies, including Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, WB, the CW, and ESPN. While many companies tout their lineup of major partners, Digitalsmiths' execs like to point out that they typically handle the full video catalogs for their big name clients.
At their suite near the show, Digitalsmiths execs are also demoing a new ability to run Google-like searches over video libraries, finding only scenes that meet whatever criteria the searcher wants. While the company can't say yet who's using the technology, some partners have already started including it.
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