In a move that tacks on technologies that will drive deeper search and discovery capabilities into its X1 platform, Comcast has acquired Watchwith, a company that has built a video metadata platform that can decipher what’s happening inside a movie, TV show or sporting event.
Financial terms of the deal, which closed last month, were not disclosed.
Watchwith’s deep metadata platform can provide information about what’s occurring within the video, such as which actors are appearing on screen, the location of a given scene, or the start of a memorable scene within a movie or TV show. It does that through the blending of two tools—an editorial tool that enables producers to manually tag specific video segments and an automated media analysis/tagging tool that relies on algorithms and machine learning techniques.
“When that process is complete, you have all of this information that, at a frame level, [tells] you what’s happening inside the video,” Rick Rioboli, senior VP of CoMPASS (Comcast Metadata Products and Search Services), explained.
