When it comes to video searching on the Net, blinkx is big.
blinkx recently inked a deal with the History Channel U.K. to feature historical audio and video content on the search web site, including speeches and clips from icons such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Albert Einstein, and Neil Armstrong as well as The History Channel UK’s video picks of the week.
Under the terms of the agreement, users will have access to hours of the best historical audio and video content on the Web.
Deeming itself the smartest and largest video search engine on the Web, blinkx.tv delivers 4 million hours of searchable content — audio, video, and TV via RSS — and boast more content than Google Video and Yahoo.
Basically, our goal is to find and collect video content from across the Web, said Suranga Chandratillake, founder and Chief Technology Officer of San Francisco-and London-based blinkx. “We do not care where it is from or what it is about.”
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.
When we started, the bulk of online content came from big media companies such as CNN, MTV, BBC, but within the last two years, user-generated content has grown, said Chandratillake, explaining that he and his team knew it was only a short time before video content would arrive on the scene. ‘It ended up being 2 and half years.’
And in terms of user-generated content, which the company has named ‘garage’ videos as part of its Garage Video Channel, makes up 1 million hours of its 4 million hours of content.
We want to be the one place on the Web to find any video — whatever it is about, wherever it is from, said Chandratillake, who predicts that by the end of the year, the site will double in content. The more content there is, the more video there is, and the more important we become.
"blinkx is thrilled to be partnering with The History Channel UK," says Chandratillake. "The History Channel UK offers some of the best historical content on the Web and we are happy to make it easily accessible through blinkx.tv."
blinkx is the only search engine optimized for rich media content.
Unlike other competitor video search engine sites, blinkx.tv uses advanced speech recognition technology to automatically listen to and understand audio and video content, moving pass the current use of metadata-based keyword services that tags titles and descriptions — and subsequently, rolling out a search engine that also moves pass a text-based Web into a more television landscape.
The company, in addition, has struck more than 80 content partnerships that allow users to spider content from as well as free content from the Web, including the History Channel UK as of July 3, MTV Networks, Sky News, Times Online to bring FIFA Archive and the Times Smart Search, Discovery Channel, UNICEF, HBO, Sundance Channel, AtomFilms, CBS Television stations, and adult entertainment providers Playboy.com and Zango.
Overcoming the Silos
With increasing numbers of people watching video online, we are keen to make as many of our programme clips available as possible on the website, said Emily Lloyd, History Channel UK. "Searchability is obviously extremely important and we are happy to be partnering with blinkx to ensure that more and more people find and view content from The History Channel.
The company positions itself as a way to overcome the silos of videos only available at specific sites by searching across the array of videos available across multiple sites.
What we are seeing in video is that the majority of players are trying to build video content, whether it is traditional sites like CNN or ABC, where you can watch their videos, or YouTube or Google or Yahoo, which is encouraging people to upload their own clips, said Chandratillake.
There is no guarantee that Google or YouTube will have every video you are interested in, he added. “You need a single place to search for video, whether it is from Google, Yahoo, or the BBC. Right now we are the only ones who do that.”
Moreover, the company has also launched: my blinkx.tv, which allows users to aggregate video content into a single customized stream to play on-demand; blinkx.tv To Go, a service that enables users to sync content to their iTunes or personal video player software; and signed an agreement with MIVA Inc. that will allow blinkx to deliver contextually targeted advertising to users via its Smart Ads Platform.
And being the largest video search engine is not the only service it aims to be, it also provides the smallest search engine named Pico. The free 1MB download retrieves relevant information from the various sources including video, Wikipedia, and social networking sites’ blogs based on context of your active screen, and appears as unobtrusive channels on the desktop, according to blinkx.
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 from 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 cannot track advertising that has been downloaded.”
But as it shifts ahead in the video Internet realm — beyond partnering with companies for their content archives, it will soon begin to license out their technology to partner companies — taking a similar approach to Google.
These partnerships, set to be announced in a month or two, will have sites incorporate the video search technology powered by blinkx and will include advertisements with the service, said Chandratillake, adding that the revenue will be shared between those sites and blinkx.
Filtering Blue Material
blinkx filters its video searches to avoid linking to adult video content and to avoid the kinds of problems Google Video has faced lately.
“Sources tell us what is appropriate and what is 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.”
We are in a pretty 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.
He said his site also tries to avoid the trap of commissioning user-generated video to avoid situations where it accidentally ends up hosting blue material.
Moreover, on the long term front, blinkx seeks availability of its content service on television and mobile, as IPTV and technology supporting it is being pushed.
As Chandratillake predicts that the remote control will be a more complex one in the future, he likens blinkx.tv to a remote control. “That is what blinkx.tv will be — a remote control for Internet video,” he said.
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 are pretty secure.”
This is only the beginning, and YouTube is only the tip of the iceberg, Chandratillake said. More content is going to spill on the Internet … its going to be amazing.