source: colleague was a core engineer there
And I remember back when Google Video was a thing that Google was indexing feeds of TV channels' subtitles. I remember there was a search engine at one point for subtitles? Presumably they still index live TV subtitles and content both to support YouTube TV but also to feed content into their YouTube Content ID program... I wonder if anyone's comparing TV subtitles to speech-to-text output to catch differences in either.
Here's an article about Google's early Video Search product for captions: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/08/brief-history-of-go... Apparently displaying and searching captions to the public for free lasted barely 6 months... Here's a screenshot showing a search result: https://informitv.com/2005/01/25/google-video-search-for-tel...
I don’t think they have any plans to do anything other than what they do now (selectively offer playback to subscribers who opted in before the broadcast), but makes you think it’s a solved technical problem that governments and other players are also probably doing.