Project Brief To create a production quality demonstration of Doovle's video search technology applied to navigating a longtail video archive. Execution The entire BBC Life Collection was chosen for its scale, its status within the BBC and also because of David Attenborough's unique standing in the eyes of the British public, who funded all the BBC Life series through their licence fees. We took all of the nine major BBC Life series (79 episodes spanning 30 years) as well as a several associated Attenborough "specials" and created a complete video archive enabling every programme to be shown at high quality, in full and at full-screen display. The entire archive is fully searchable either as a whole or by individual series. And each programme can be browsed visually to find a scene to watch using thumbnail scene browsing.
Background In 2006, The BBC invited entrants from all over the world to submit innovative applications and technologies in several categories, including digital and mobile video. The Doovle video search (codenamed Doovle) was shortlisted as a finalist and invited to present its entry to a panel of judges at MIPTV 2006 in Cannes. Although our entry to the competition was based on a searchable index of Fawlty Towers and Blackadder, we were invited by the BBC to produce a more complete and higher quality demonstration. Technical All the video in the BBC Life collection demo is H.264 MP4 encoded and streamed via Flash Streaming Server 3.5. The video search engine index was constructed from subtitle data made available from the DVD versions of each of the BBC Life series.
