Google recently announced that they too are entering the video indexing/search business, in competition with the likes of Yahoo! and HP Labs. As a recent article notes:

[from News.com]

Like Google's recent library project scanning volumes of books, the company's video ambitions highlight its broad plans to digitize the world's content and make it searchable. It also foreshadows a heated race with rivals Yahoo and Microsoft to be the de facto service for finding information wherever it resides: television, the Internet, cell phones or other convergence devices.

I've often wondered why video was the next indexed platform, however. Sure, video killed the radio star, but then again audio came first. It seems like we've barely mastered the audio techniques, audio recognition, and things of that like but we're skipping over our roots.

I'd venture that indexing video is potentially easier than indexing audio. Why? Reading image patterns is possible already. Video, in its most empirical state, is a series of images with a possible audio track underneath. Video has the other benefit that it is often closed-captioned for a variety of audiences. is this why video is being indexed first?

Certainly, I don't think that the current podcasting rage would be enough fuel to drive better audio indexing. But isn't there a ton of audio out there that needs to be indexed still - including the audio embedded in video?