New York — Oft-rumored acquisition target, video search provider Blinkx, sharpened its defense and offense against a possible buyout from Google or Yahoo, on Wednesday said it has signed new pacts with several major online partners, one of which happens to be owned by Microsoft.
Blinkx launched its latest video search service in the form of “Red Label,” a syndication service that allows customers to integrate its search results and make money from videos indexed by Blinkx on their sites.
Blinkx said the latest service entitled Red Label, would be available in two levels. The first level would be for larger customers that use Blinkx services while the second level would be a self-service portal for smaller sites, such as blogs.
The design makes total sense. With the presence of broadband and the rocketing popularity of Google’s YouTube, video is an open space for Web sites who not only want to attract users, but keep them there as long as possible.
With the Red Label program, the company is further unlocking its application programming interface (API) so other sites can pipe video search queries to Blinkx, retrieve the results, and publish them, said Chief Executive and founder Suranga Chandratillake.
“If you have less than 10,000 searches per day, you can have access for free. If you have in excess of 10,000, we ask you to monetize it and share with us,” Chandratillake said. Sites can integrate Blinkx’s advertisements and split revenue evenly; those sites that already have monetization under way must work out a specific revenue-sharing plan with the company, he added.
By inserting ads within the videos, as well as along the sides of their properties, Web site owners expect to crack into the market for video ads, one that Google has barely scratched. It is also one that IDC and Forrester Research both claim is positioned for explosive growth in the next few years, surpassing even search ad growth.
Blinkx, though already had several search deals under its hood with various sites including Ask.com and Lycos, and the Red Label project makes such partnerships easier to set up in the future, Chandratillake said.
The latest agreements between Blinkx and two new such partners that are using the API: MSN UK and Russian Internet portal Rambler Media centered around Blinx’s newly rolled out Red Label, a program designed to give partners customizable access to Blinkx’s video search engine and up to 26 million hours of video content in the Blinkx index.
Blinkx searches videos not just by examining textual metadata such as titles, tags, and descriptions that accompany videos, but also by performing speech recognition to convert audio to text and by visual recognition that can recognize text and some famous faces in the videos themselves.
Chandratillake continued said Google has both technically and strategically attacked the video hosting model rather than the video search model. “They are doing a little more video search now, but it is still pretty half-hearted compared to what they have thrown into the video hosting and video sharing model.”
He further added that the opportunity for those that want to leverage video without going through YouTube is huge because large companies are wary of working with Google.
While the ad industry is anticipating strong revenue growth from online video this year, it is yet to become reality. The Wall Street Journal reported this month that ad revenue from YouTube, the world’s largest video site, would likely total about $200 million this year — short of parent company Google Inc.’s expectations.
Blink executives point to Forrester Research which predicts the online video ad market will reach $7.2 billion by 2012.
In the agreement with Rambler, Blinkx will power video search for the Russian portal, giving users access to an index of over three million Russian-language video clips. Under terms of the arrangement, advertising revenue from the project will be shared by Blinkx and Rambler.
Blinkx’s new Red Label program for partners is available in both a fully hosted version and an XML-based edition.