i met bob eggington, former bbc. he has brought bbc news online and he is pretty realistic: "we are not online to make money, we are online to spend money. we are providing utility." is one of his quotes.

well these days - he retired from bbc last year - he is promoting his new product: dremedia. interesting piece of software. purpose archiving, information retrieval, production, but i have to add amazing tracking tool: video analysing, speech to text transformation, contextual understanding. you can go through the archive and cut out a piece by copying and pasting the line of text you need - you get it together with the right piece of video. "locating video footage by reference to the spoken word. information retrieval from spoken documents, speaker recognition, language recognition and speech enhancement."

the underlying technology is autonomy´s pattern matching and speech recognition from softsound and quantel´s clipbox servers and editing packages. advanced and mostly bugfree software - he says - glued together to a new product. worth to look at it i think.

i found a speech from him online at streaming media west '98.