Techno-economic Challenges of Audiovisual Search Engines

Current retrieval tools (mostly text-based) are key technologies for the Information Society. Given the explosion of audiovisual data, future AV search engines will become even more central to society than they are today. The provision of relevant results in AV search is far more complex than in text-based search, and progress in AV search will depend on new innovations and also on improving existing concepts. For instance, retrieving relevant audio-visual material will benefit from new content-based search (audio, video, images) but it will also largely rely on meta-data (text) concepts. The technological challenges range from basic science to development tasks. Semantic approaches for search or novel technological concepts to master the generation and flow of huge amounts of data are examples of fundamental research tasks. Interactive search concepts, relevance feedback systems, multi-modal analysis or improved retrieval algorithms are examples of bottlenecks that must be removed to improve current applications. Technology and business considerations go hand in hand. How to deal with the processing, storage and traffic of huge amounts of audiovisual data is a technological challenge that will require new computer architectures, and distributed search solutions. There are also important financial implications which could influence considerably the entry barriers for newcomers onto the AV search market. The deployment of AV search technology is, therefore, likely to reinforce many of current techno-economic trends of the web search market. Examples are the concentration effect of general-purpose web search engines, or the emergence of thematic search networks. At the moment, there is a clear distinction in the AV search market, with regard to web search, business solutions or mobile search, due to the nature of the industry, the client structure and the business models. In the future, these differences may blur. Web search engine providers are already starting to acquire companies offering business solutions and non-walled garden business models may emerge in the mobile search sector.

COMPANO Ramon; 

2009-01-20

European Audiovisual Observatory / Council of Europe

JRC49793

978-92-871-6559-6,