Blinkx attempts to crash the music video party

Video might've killed the radio star, but the Web sure hasn't killed music videos. Less than a week after News Corp.-owned social site MySpace announced its MySpace Music Videos portal, video search engine Blinkx announced the debut Tuesday of "Blinkx Music," a search tool specifically designed to trawl through music videos across the Web.

"There are hundreds of thousands of music videos available on the Web today which makes it nearly impossible to navigate and find what you are looking for," Blinkx founder and CEO Suranga Chandratillake explained in a release. "Based on the success of blinkx Remote, our online TV guide, we recognized there was a need to help organize music videos and make them easily searchable on the Web. By leveraging our award-winning video search index, we built Blinkx Music to help our users find their favorite music videos quickly, easily and in one place."

Blinkx says that its search engine has thus far indexed more than 33,000 hours of music videos from about 10,000 artists. While it says that Blinkx Music will let users "post comments and interact with other fans, and also offers background information about bands and their work," the release doesn't say whether it will provide links to streaming or download partners, from which it could potentially rake in revenues shares.

But this is a tight space, and MySpace's music video portal won't be Blinkx Music's only competitor. Universal Music Group is still putting together Vevo, a Hulu-like portal for music videos that aims to bring artists and labels the revenues they might not be getting from YouTube (though the Google-owned video platform is providing Vevo's technology).

Also looming in the background is Google's forthcoming music offering, which the company plans to formally unveil in a press event on Wednesday in Los Angeles. This could instantly run away with a huge market share in music video (and music download) search.

Some background on Blinkx: it's a publicly traded company based in the U.K. It merged with a search engine called Autonomy and then was spun off from it when it went public in May 2007. When rumors started to swirl last year that Google and News Corp. (which, coincidentally, owns MySpace) were interested in acquiring it, shares of Blinkx stock soared.

A correction was made at 11:31 a.m. PT on November 2: Blinkx has been de-merged from Autonomy.

[dascha1]

Some things don't seem to change. In 2006, Suranga told me that Speech Recognition was how blinkx solved the problem, though where is this actual solution progress today with making every effort to comply sites with accessibility and/or standards, Section 508, etc.? He sure seems to talk a good game, but I just don't see the progress for everyone.

[TimJoslin]

Blinkx was spun off from Autonomy, not merged with it.

[askgees]

This is how they plan to compete. They well get started. Then they will run to the EU and complain that they cannot get their fair share of the market. Even though they we're a day late and a dollar short. The EU in typical EU fashion will file anti trust law suites against their competitors and claim that the half @zz company based in Europe is being victimized. LOL Just cut off these pompous @zz holes. Does anyone even give a crap about the EU?