Blinkx Partners with ITN, Launching Full-Service IPTV Platform blinkx.tv DirectPlay at www.blinkx.tv
Blinkx, the smartest thing on the Web, has struck a partnership deal with news producer ITN, one of the world’s leading news producers, creating a new broadband TV platform for media brands in the process. Blinkx has been appointed to create and power the official ITN player, as well as make their news searchable through Blinkx.tv.
The new DirectPlay solution lets content owners broadcast and monetize video using an own-branded Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) platform powered by Blinkx.
ITN is the latest site to be added to blinkx’s news and information line-up, already featuring Reuters, Business Week, Euro News and the New York Times. Users from around the world will be able to search over 80 clips from ITN per week, covering breaking national and international news, analysis and interviews on the day’s stories and even daily showbiz news bulletins.
Blinkx.tv — the only search engine that is optimized for searching rich media content — simplifies this choice by collecting video content from different news outlets, such as ITN, and making it fully searchable at a single destination. The blinkx technology creates footage transcripts and indexes this footage to deliver more accurate search results.
Under the deal, Blinkx will power the official ITN player using the DirectPlay engine. Web users can search more than 80 clips from ITN per week, linked to from both www.blinkx.tv and www.ITN.co.uk.
Blinkx has also entered into a partnership with the online rich media advertising firm Eyeblaster, which will insert advertising into all searchable ITN content.
Revenue generated from this advertising will be shared by Blinkx and ITN.
Nicholas Wheeler, Managing Director of ITN Multimedia, said: "ITN has always pioneered new and innovative ways to deliver its content and the blinkx platform is certainly an exciting new proposition that is really opening up the type of information that is searchable and available on the web.
In an increasingly fragmented market, it is important that users can find high-quality, relevant content as easily as possible and blinkx helps do that. We are delighted that this deal with them will enable us to extend the reach of our news and entertainment content still further.
Unlike most other search engines, which sort their search listings based on ‘spidering’ text based Web codes, the Blinkx search engine is optimized for searching rich media content, creating footage transcripts which are then indexed to deliver search results.
"Blinkx is committed to providing users with quality content from a range of sources," said Federico Grosso, VP business development for Europe, blinkx. "ITN provides 24-hour news, seven days a week, so really gives users immediate and constant access to breaking stories in the UK and abroad. The channel is well-regarded and relied upon in the UK and thanks to the blinkx technology can now be searched by millions more users across the world."
Blinkx.tv DirectPlay and Eyeblaster
blinkx.tv DirectPlay is based on blinkx’s established and successful SelfCast platform that hosts and manages content from amateur content creators and vloggers. DirectPlay is an IPTV platform that provides content publishers with a single-stop solution to recording, encoding, hosting, streaming, distributing and monetizing television and video content on the internet.
Utilizing blinkx’s popular video search infrastructure that already offers over a million hours of content at blinkx.tv, DirectPlay records and encodes content in multiple formats. The content is then played back through branded video players that can be linked to from both blinkx.tv search results as well as content publisher sites. DirectPlay supports multiple delivery technologies including branded Flash-based players, a full screen playback mode, and off-line delivery options RSS, Atom and iTunes; DirectPlay partners can distribute their content directly to the Video iPod and other portable media players with fully-automatic, one-click synchronization.
Using the Eyeblaster Rich Media Platform, blinkx will now also insert advertising into all searchable ITN content. “Revenues generated from this advertising will be shared by blinkx and ITN.”
With a wide variety of news sources available online, consumers now have even more choice about where they find up-to-the-minute information.