In this paper, we introduce the Interactive Systems Laboratories
video indexing and retrieval system 'View4You'.
The main components of the system, namely the segmenter, the
speech recognizer and the information retrieval engine, are described
in detail. 
 

In the View4You system, public television newscasts are recorded on a daily basis.
The newscasts are automatically segmented and an index is
created for each of the segments by means of automatic speech 
recognition. The user can query the system in natural language. 
The system returns a list of segments which is sorted by 
relevance with respect to the user query. By selecting a 
segment, the user can watch the corresponding part of the 
news show on his or her computer screen. 

Several end to end evaluations on real world data, using questions from
naive users, are described. By substituting each of the components of
the system with a perfect (manually simulated) one, the effect of the components'
imperfection on the end to end result can be determined. We show,
that the information retrieval component has the largest impact on the
system performance, followed by the segmentation. The quality of the
speech recognizer, as long as its error rate is below approximately 25%,
is shown to have only a relatively small importance.