Searching the Small Screen
Since most of our media is video and audio, search engines for those are really needed. This is a start, but more work is needed. Who will be the Google of the Audio search engine world? Boxfish using subtitles and closed captioning is a good start…
A new search startup called Boxfish can help. The company opened up its site in a public beta testing phase in late March, allowing users to search through words and phrases used on the TV within the past month, see the topics that are trending on TV, and set up alerts for broadcast mentions of specific terms like “Lady Gaga” or “lottery.”
Boxfish was created by Eoin Dowling and Kevin Burkitt, Ireland natives now based in Palo Alto, California, who sold a mobile entertainment startup called Red Circle to Zamano, a Web and mobile company, in 2007.
When Dowling lived in London a few years ago, he came up with the idea for Boxfish as a result of watching TV with his mother—her poor hearing meant that when she visited him, they had to watch TV with the subtitles on. “I was sitting there and this idea came to me: All these words are references to what’s happening right now. I wonder what TV would look like if it were just text streaming through the airwaves?” he says.