The TV AI Explorer uses the Cloud Video AI API to perform OCR text recovery over television news programming on BBC News London, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and the ABC/CBS/NBC evening news broadcasts each day, identifying all onscreen text and making it keyword searchable. Cloud Video's OCR is able to accurately recover text across a wide range of fonts, text/background color differentials and camera and text angles. This makes it possible to literally keyword search bookshelves on television news for a particular book to track where it appears onscreen.
What if we wanted to track appearances of Roger McNamee's "Zucked" book? We can simply search for appearances of "Zucked" anywhere in the onscreen text back to the start of last year! This will return any case where it appears in the onscreen text, which means it will capture both bookshelves and chyron or other station-generated text appearances, but it is straightforward to skim the results to identify bookshelf appearances. We've included some examples below to show how accurately the OCR captures these appearances, flagging cases that a human would struggle to locate.
