grose's blog

Zinc Beta-3 video browser for the living room gets significant facelift; adds Netflix, CBS and much more content from leading providers.

The new release adds a significant amount of content from existing providers to its on-demand library, as well as the addition of Netflix and CBS to the prior lineup. There are now nearly 15,000 feature length movies and tens of thousands of TV shows that can be watched instantly.

Zinc also has improved navigation and usability features, making it easier and faster to immediately enjoy Internet video. Detailed show descriptions, release dates, ratings and other new information have also been added, so users can make informed decisions about what episodic content to watch, or what new feature-length movie they should select. Users can also declare favorite shows and websites, and be informed when new content is available.

We’ve had some questions about search within Zinc so I wanted to take a minute to explain our search implementation. There are times when you have heard of a movie or TV show, but don’t know where to find it. We implemented a search capability over the “feeds” that carry movies and TV shows. We are not Google, and recognized that the existing search engines at the content providers could generate even more results. They have access to all the content on their site, and their affiliate sites.

At the ZvPresents page, users can enter a search string in the text box at the top and click the search button to get episodes or movies from CBS, ABC, Fox, Hulu, CW, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, and from paid sites Amazon and Netflix. If you only want free results; then inside Settings> PC Settings, users can set the preference to ignore results from each of the paid sites. As a convenience to the user, the search results page also includes tabs at the top for YouTube, Hulu, and Google. Clicking those tabs will launch the same search phrase on the search engines at those sites, providing the user with more results. We’ve also provided access to search at the top page from both Hulu and YouTube.

Our search results use show name, episode name and description to rank the results, but currently don’t index actors or directors. As more content providers supply that metadata we will add it to the indexing. Search results are RSS feeds and can be added to favorites. If you’re a big fan of the Simpson’s, use search results to provide you access to an even larger set of free episodes.

Video metadata is the "extra information" available about the content such as genre (comedy, adventure, family...), average viewer rating (three stars, four and a half stars...), actors, director, content advisory (rated PG-13, R, X...) and so on. Showing this information to Zinc users and letting you find things to watch based on it (from many content sources) is one of the coolest features of Zinc.

We get this metadata several ways, but one of the best sources is from the content site's RSS feed. There is a standard (developed by Yahoo!) called Media RSS that defines how to encode some of the metadata.

The next release of Zinc is going to have some exciting enhancements made possible by this metadata. The theory is great, but in practice each site is different and the Media RSS standard is very flexible, so it's a challenge trying to glean this information from the feeds.
We're going to keep pushing the content providers to give us more while we continue to enhance Zinc to make the best use of what it gets.

So that's metadata and why Zinc users should care. When Zinc Beta 3 is released (real soon, we promise) let us know what you think of how we've used it.

Welcome to the ZeeVee blog.

We'll post news, updates and things we think may be generally useful to our community here.

Let's start with an update on what's happening with Zinc (f.k.a. Zviewer). We sent out a survey and we've been gathering feedback on the forum and your input is definitely being incorporated.