The News Browser was a prototype Digital Video Recorder built on a Windows platform, designed and built for Paul Allens think tank, Interval Research.
This DVR had many capabilities not yet found in commercial products. It could record multiple television news programs at once to the hard disk and had the ability to detect and classify each news article based on the closed captioning information.
ACME Software specified the unique hardware for this project like the Infra-red remote control and television tuners, and did a major portion of the programming, including a "relevance engine" that could cross-reference all the news broadcasts against the available wire service feeds and extract detailed information from multiple sources.
ACME software also wrote a real-time implementation of the "Synchronized Overlapped Add" (SOLA) algorithm for temporal compression of audio playback speed with no change in pitch.
