Content-based search overviews and exploratory browsing of movies with MovieClouds

Videos, and especially movies, often engage viewers perceptually, cognitively and emotionally, by combining diverse symbol systems, such as images, texts, music and narration to tell stories. As one of the biggest sources of entertainment, in individual and social contexts, they are increasingly accessible as enormous collections over the internet, in social media and iTV. These richer environments demand for new and more powerful ways to search, browse and view videos that may benefit from video content-based analysis and classification techniques. In this paper, we describe and evaluate MovieClouds, its core and extended features of content processing, interactive search, overview and browsing designed to access, explore and visualise movies, from overview clouds, at the movies space down to the movies, based on the information conveyed in their different content tracks. It adopts a tag cloud unifying-paradigm, to extend to movies the power, flexibility, engagement and fun usually associated with clouds.