AOL Launches Video Portal In India, Taiwan, Canada
New York – Time Warner Inc.’s Internet division AOL has made further progress in its bid to turn into a portal destination; today announced that it will launch versions of its video service in Canada, India and Taiwan as part of an aggressive global expansion.
The extension is part of Time Warner’s plans to transform AOL as a free, advertising-dependent Web site, as well as to convert itself into a one-stop shop for advertising services for other companies.
By autumn, it will also launch versions of its video portal, AOL Video (video.aol.com), in the United Kingdom, France and Germany, AOL Video senior vice president Fred McIntyre said in an interview.
“If you look at usage patterns on online video, it is the first global broadband user behavior,” McIntyre said. “It happened everywhere in the world at the same time.”
The basis of the services is build around AOL’s video search technology, Truveo, which has indexed, or searched and sorted related information on than 170 million videos in 16 countries including: Russia, Hong Kong, Germany and France.
“What users are interested in, and what the biggest problems are, usually is about not being able to find what they are looking for,” McIntyre said.
Being part of AOL’s extension program, it will also start offering local versions of its men’s lifestyle site Asylum in the United Kingdom, India, Australia and New Zealand, and Italy. Each region will have a local editor that will syndicate programming from the U.S. version as well as create local content.
Asylum, launched in the United States in December, will also be launched in other parts of Europe and South America this year.
Worldwide accessibility of online videos from the United States has been held up by copyright licenses, which are negotiated on a regional basis, Internet executives said this week at the Reuters Global Media and Telecoms Summit.
Nevertheless AOL said it has agreed on deals with local programming partners for its regional sites. The availability of shows from U.S. programming partners, such as Hulu, a joint venture of News Corp and General Electric’s NBC Universal, or CBS Corp, is unclear and varies depending on partners.
Despite its slow-moving online advertising development over the last few quarters, AOL.com has been riding a high, attracting record numbers of visitors, according to comScore Media Metrix.
Unique visitors to AOL’s programming sites rose 12 percent to 55.4 million in April, its seventh consecutive month of growth.
“But it has all the same needs to generate bigger ad sales from its popularity.”