Microsoft has just announced the acquisition of VideoSurf, a video discovery company known for its technology that makes video discovery fast, easy and accurate. The company plans to use VideoSurf’s technology to augment the Xbox 360 ecosystem and evolve search and discovery of entertainment content on Xbox LIVE.
For those of you not in the know, VideoSurf gives users the ability to really search videos – current video searches are based on file names, user created tags and so on, which is limited to how diligent the video uploaders are when it comes to tagging their videos. VideoSurf’s technology can “see” inside the video to understand what it’s about and who appears in it, which makes searching much more accurate and useful.
With Microsoft planning to turn the Xbox into an all-in-one system for watching TV and gaming, acquiring VideoSurf for Xbox LIVE could be a pretty big move for the company considering that nobody else does this kind of video searching yet. But then again, it’s all really going to depend on the content it can get – after all, what’s the point of being able to search for content when there’s nothing to search through? Stay tuned for more news on how Microsoft will implement VideoSurf in Xbox LIVE.