As IBM’s chief innovation officer Bernie Meyerson describes innovation, it is made of two kinds of activity; original ideas that are realized as discontinuous inventions and then subsequently made more useful through continuous improvement. The spinning disk drive (first commercialized in the 1950’s) started out as something completely new and game changing. These early drives started out holding less than four megabytes (about one song download) and were larger than refrigerators. Today’s drives hold terabytes and fit in your jacket pocket. Without continuous innovation many breakthroughs would find limited utility in the real world (according to Meyerson, the storage in your smartphone would take up the space of two cruise ships using those original drives).
Creating new utility from broadcast monitoring is the focus of continuous innovation at TVEyes. The traditional use for our service – indexing, alerting and search of broadcast for keywords and phrases remains a powerful application, but there is so much more that can be done once you have a searchable database of everything broadcast. The patent we were awarded on September 29, 2015, patent 9,148,675 SYSTEM FOR SOCIAL MEDIA TAG EXTRACTION, is a powerful demonstration of what might be termed “continuous innovation,” as described by IBM’s Meyerson. You can read the full text of the patent at the USPTO Website.
Increases in computing power and storage (thanks to continuous innovation) made it possible for us to invent a system to capture, store and extract text from every frame of video captured using enhanced OCR. Building on that foundation, we created a system to enable search and alerts for social media tags and handles, and a variety of other elements including logos, brands and other text of interest. The patent also covers analysis of social media activity resulting from the broadcast of the content in question – for the first time linking these important media in a cause and effect scenario.
Before this invention it was impossible to monitor or search broadcast media for the vast majority of tag and handle mentions, nor analyze and report on their appearance. Yet the impact of social media incorporated within broadcast is widely understood to be important to connect news, entertainment and advertising with Internet-resident resources and social media platforms.
The potential users for this new functionality extend through and beyond the PR, corporate communications and public information departments, enabling new functional areas of the organization including marketing, research and strategic planning. Imagine being able to report on national, regional or local coverage of TV graphics carrying a new hash tag that your social media marketing team dreams up and also tracking and analyzing the resulting use of this hash tag across social media including Twitter and Facebook. Likewise, advertisers and researchers will find utility in tracking their own and competitor brands in both paid and earned media in ways that were previously impossible. Like many highly useful and broadly applicable innovations, it ultimately will be our users and partner-developers of third-party software who will imagine and create new ways of using this capability.
Want to learn more about the patent and how it might apply to something you’re building? Please write us at patents@tveyes.com and let’s start a conversation.
For more information about TVEyes Media Monitoring Suite, please call 203-254-3600 x100 or sales@tveyes.com, or request a free trial.
