blinkx Searches History Search engine signs deal to feature video from History Channel UK
Red Herring Magazine July 3, 2006 http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=17449&hed=blinkx%20Searches%20History blinkx inked a deal Monday with the History Channel U.K. to feature historical audio and video content on the search web site, including speeches and clips of Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Albert Einstein, and Neil Armstrong. The site is using speech recognition technology to automatically index the content and make it searchable. The deal with the History Channel U.K. should increase the company's range of more than 4 million hours of video. The History Channel is owned by A&E Television Networks, a joint venture of Hearst, Disney ABC Cable, and NBC Universal Cable. San Francisco-based blinkx has been expanding its alliances to allow search across a variety of sites, including Google Video, YouTube, HBO, MTV Networks, the New York Times, and Revver. The company now receives over 3.5 million video search queries per day. Overcoming the Silos The company positions itself as a way to overcome the silos of videos only available at specific sites and searching across the array available across multiple sites. "What we're seeing in video is that the majority of players are trying to build video content, whether it's traditional sites like CNN or ABC, where you can watch their videos, or YouTube or Google or Yahoo, which are encouraging people to upload their own clips," said Suranga Chandratillake, chief technology officer of blinkx. "There's no guarantee that Google or YouTube will have every video you're interested in," he added. "You need a single place to search for video, whether it's from Google, Yahoo, or the BBC. Right now we're the only ones who do that." However, he acknowledged that some other search engines, such as Yahoo, do allow users to search for video from other sites. Mr. Chandratillake said he doesn't mind competition from other sites, though. "It's great for us," he said. "As video-sharing sites do well, there's more video available to search." He said his site tries not to be a walled garden. While many sites don't allow users to download their videos to keep them from spreading too widely, blinkx indicates with an icon whether a video can be downloaded for a particular site or video blog where it is linking. "The reality is that right now, the way revenue is generated is through advertising, and if people download stuff, they can potentially remove the advertising," said Mr. Chandratillake. "You can't track advertising that's been downloaded." Filtering Blue Material blinkx does filtering on the videos to avoid linking to adult video content and to avoid the kinds of problems Google Video has faced lately. "Sources tell us what's appropriate and what's not appropriate," Mr. Chandratillake said. "We look at the content of the video and we also have a manual override and an adult filter on the site." He said his site also tries to avoid the trap of commissioning user-generated video to avoid getting into situations where it accidentally ends up hosting blue material. "We're in a pretty nice strong position," said Mr. Chandratillake. "Google Video is under a lot of pressure to start generating revenue. To do that, Google is turning itself into a portal so people can come and watch content and pay for it." blinkx has been self-funded and angel-funded and is said to have raised over $10 million so far. "We hope to get through without significant VC funding," Mr. Chandratillake said. "We have no VC funding yet, but we will certainly talk to VCs from a strategic point of view. But from a financial point of view we're pretty secure." ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 antunes at uh dot edu Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _____________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
