Search BBC Video

I’m not sure how this works but I’m guessing it uses the AV feeds and Search feeds available through backstage.bbc.co.uk but a new search engine has been built to let you search for audio video content on the bbc.co.uk website.

Unlike the BBCs own AV search this one pops the video up straight into media selector so you can watch it there and then without clicking through to another page.

According to backstage.bbc.co.uk it searches close to 300,000 video clips on www.bbc.co.uk and serves them up in the BBC media selector.

Apparently “It seems to be indexing the Beta BBC AV RSS feeds and looking at other sources. The HTML is very simple and the URL syntax nice enough. There is also support for simple Boolean searches.”

I searched for Torchwood on the BBC AV search and was given a single, old news clip from the BBC News website - fair enough and the interface is prettier but not that useful.

I searched searchbbcvideo.com for Torchwood and was given a long list of clips including roundups, catchups, clips and more from the Torchwood website and more.

This is something the BBC search team should look at seriosly as it’s much more useful than a handful of news clips. It could also be expanded to search video sharing sites like YouTube for BBC clips.

It could be that the iPlayer (being more than just a video playing app) will solve a number of the problems around finding video on bbc.co.uk and so BBC Video Search will be a bit pointless but who knows.

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