New York — Want to sit back, relax, and watch comedic cat videos? Consorting to the likeness of consumer behavior, video search company Blinkx is poised to introduce a new way to search video clips that makes it easier to discover new content and an enhanced viewing platform with a cleaner interface and new discovery tools, including audio meta-data tagging.
Responding to the demands of consumer for “lean back,” casual viewing experiences online, the British company has redesigned its website by adding three new buttons: “Entertain Me,” “Inform Me,” and “Give Me My Own Channel,” each of which programs linear viewing of relevant videos using “concept clustering technology.”
The aim is to assist consumers get different classes of videos — entertaining videos, news, and videos related to what they have sought before — without having to explicitly search for it.
“You do not have to say what you want. We will just find it for you. We will just supply it to you passively, like with TV,” said Chief Executive and founder Suranga Chandratillake.
With this enhancement, the company could move beyond video search to become more of a video portal.
By selecting the “Inform Me” button gathers the most recent and viewed video clips of current events around the web in a playlist, and tacks them into a nice flow. Viewers can then watch the clips in sequence, skim through them, or search — for scenes or faces within the video, visually similar scenes, or related videos. It is as if YouTube and the rest were mashed into a single show that is similar to what you would see on a 24-hour news network.
The “Entertain Me" option builds a corresponding playlist of amusing videos — cats playing the piano, roller-skating dogs, and so on. It is an algorithmic version of The World’s Funniest Home Videos, though one that requires a fairly elastic definition of “funniest.”
The “Give Me My Own Channel” option essentially functions like the previous two only that it allows the viewer to assign the search terms used to assemble the playlist. Entering “iphone programming,” for example, creates a sequence of video programming tutorials for Apple’s iPhone from videos posted all over the Web.
“We have a [20 percent] section of our user base who get to the site and who do not really seem to know what to search for,” said Chandratillake. “They think [I do not know what I’m looking for, so I do not know what to type into the search box.’”
The new buttons sort out that problem by gathering the most watched, shared, commented and tagged videos from across the web.
“You will get four or five geopolitical stories, a couple of sports stories, maybe an entertainment story, a finance story,” added Chandratillake. “It is sort of like sitting in front of your television and being able to click on CNN.”
Online video is growing enormously. December was a record month, with U.S. viewers watching 14.3 billion online videos, 41 percent of them at Google, which operates YouTube. Blinkx’s business is to try to connect people to these videos using search technology that looks not just at metadata such as video titles, but also words that are spoken and detected with speech recognition technology.
And certainly, the major key for businesses is making money on the popularity of online video. Blinkx sells ads, probably with an ads-per-minute formula similar to what people are used to with TV, Chandratillake said. However, “When we first launch, we would not put on a lot of ads,” he said.
The next move, after the success of web, is the living room and the cellphone. Chandratillake said he is in discussions with various set-top box manufacturers about getting embedded there. As for an iPhone app, he would not say, but implied that some sort of mobile app is also in the works.
The company having 65 employees and is hiring, Chandratillake said. In the six months ended Sept. 1, the company garnered $6.5 million in revenue; analysts expect $13 million to $14 million for the full fiscal year, which ends in March, he said.
“We expect to hit profitability in 2010,” Chandratillake added.