Hulu, the free, ad-supported broadband video venture co-owned by The Walt Disney Company (ABC), NBC Universal and News Corp. (Fox), contacted [itvt] Monday to let us know that it has beta-launched a Captions Search service that it says allows users to search the captioning of "thousands of videos from hundreds of shows" (including, for example, "Glee," "Modern Family," "30 Rock" and "The Colbert Report") on its platform. It bills the new service as providing users with an easy way to jump straight to memorable moments, performances and punch lines "without having to spend a ton of time skipping forward or backward within an individual video to find what they are looking for." This is the second upgrade to its service's search functionality that Hulu has rolled out over the past few weeks: last month (see the article published on itvt.com, November 30th), it launched an Advanced Search feature.
In order to use Captions Search, users select a "Captions" tab that appears under any video that offers closed captioning. They can then enter a word or phrase into a "Captions Search" box; and, when their search results appear (as thumbnail images of the sections of a video that correspond to the search terms they entered), they can place their cursor on each video result's thumbnail image in order to preview from within the thumbnail the section of the video they were looking for, or else click the thumbnail in order to start playing the full-size video of that section.
As part of the Captions Search service, Hulu is also launching a feature informally dubbed the "heat map." A posting on the company's blog describes how it works: "This is a visual graph of the user interest throughout the span of a video and is available on any captioned video that has accumulated enough user views," the blog posting--from Hulu's VP of product, Eugene Wei--explains. "It appears at the top of the captions tab for those videos. We analyze a variety of viewer behaviors to generate the heat map. The first use for the heat map is as a navigation tool: You can click on any bar in the graph to jump to that section of captions. If you search the captions for a video, we'll highlight bars in blue in the heat map to indicate where the matching results appear in the video. But a second use is to find particularly popular segments within that video. For many videos, interest is fairly linear across a program, but for some shows, the pattern reveals intriguing spikes." Wei's post goes on to explain that, so far at least, the spikes typically reflect viewer interest in musical performances within programs.
