OpTV: Live TV search.

The dutch public broadcasters put most of their programs online at UitzendingGemist. However, their search only searches the descriptions of the programs. It doesn’t search the actual content, of what was said during the shows. For a few years I had an idea of how this could be fixed: Most television programs are subtitled (for deaf people). Those subtitles could be used as transcript of the program, to make it searchable and do other fun stuff with.

A few months ago, I had some spare time, and I built this search. Today I’m releasing the first alpha version (altho the badge says beta, it really isn’t beta quality yet. Especially if you consider beta products like Google’s). Sometimes the scraping of subtitles breaks, the search is sometimes really slow, and the linking to uitzendinggemist often breaks. Still it’s a fun way to browse TV programs.  It currently has one other feature (besides search) : It can generate wordle word clouds of TV programs, which give an interesting overview of the contents of a TV program.

The beta is now live at http://dev.panman.nl/optv/