TV’s Mile-High Mountain of Content

A Mountain Boxfish Intends to Chart and Climb

7.16.2012—TV is an all-encompassing medium. Every smart and dumb thing publicly said across the globe finds its way onto a television set somewhere. Indexing that content is quite a sizable task, to say the least. During our user testing oh so long ago (the next round is coming) we heard the same thing repeated over and over: “How are they tracking all of TV?”

If it seems like a lot of data, that is because it is a lot of data. What we track and comb through to make Boxfish what it is an ever-growing amount, but monitoring every word spoken on television, just in the US alone, in real time…that is an Everest of words.

While I can add my own words to explain the scope of what we are dealing with, it might be better to show some numbers.

In a given week, roughly 80,000 unique programs hit airwaves. Including repeats,  around 2.2 million programs air across the United States and its territories. These 2 million-plus programs air across 13,286 channels in 10,191 service areas.

The top 4 programs that get the most airtime across the US are as follows: 

PBS NewsHour - 7,647

Nightly Business Report - 7,607

Family Feud - 5,274

Wheel of Fortune - 3,900

Like I said, an Everest of words.

Tech Titans Tout Updates, But TV Needs To Catch Up

The Next TV Tech Needs to be Done Right to Bring it to Next Level

6.25.2012—It seems that guns are drawn and the standoff begins to see who will be left standing in the showdown for dominance of the TV space.

(Excuse all the cowboy references as of late, it all started when the 2nd screen was called the wild west of TV)

One after the other, tech titans each announce their next products that will be handed down to the masses. This week it’s Google’s turn, with the search giant holding two keynote speeches in San Francisco’s Moscone Center to unveil what they have in store for consumers. One of the announcements being made is Google TV’s update, which is lauded to bring long-awaited features to the TV console. 

The update is said to usher in an emphasis on connecting users to content first, and the source of that content later. How they plan to do this is unify the search query, combing television, DVR and Netflix results for the programs a user searches for. 

As the Fox News article says of the update’s feature, “If you want to watch ‘The Walking Dead,’ do you really care if it is available live, on your DVR, or on Netflix? No. You don’t. You just want to find it and let the search engine figure out where.”

One thing that may be overlooked by many of these content searching solutions that everyone is proposing is this: the search may not go deep enough.

We at Boxfish are the first ones to agree that discovering TV is content driven, not source-driven. Likewise, being able to search shows and channels is a no-brainer. What you don’t here is anyone rushing to provide a search for TV content by subject, or keyword…except for us. 

This is not to inflate our egos. The current state of searching for something on TV is simply unacceptable. Google understands this, thus they are updating how you search for content on Google TV. However, our collective idea of “search” has evolved to something so beyond what anyone has provided for TV content, that is has no choice, but to catch up to the times—mostly because of what Google did for searching on the web. 

If you look at phones, computers, internet, hell, even books, our interaction with these mediums through tech has jumped further in the last 5 years than they have in the 30 years prior. TV is the tortoise in the race. It lags behind, but when it does catch up, if all of us in the game do our jobs right, it could far surpass what we have seen in any kind of tech up to now. 

Forget channel surfing (Ars Technica Story on Boxfish!)

How Boxfish plans to revolutionize real-time TV search

5.3.2012—Cyrus Farivar wrote a great article for Ars Technica about how Boxfish is revolutionizing searching for TV content. The story was also picked up by Hacker News and put on the front page. We’re making a splash like crazy! Excited to see where this leads.

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