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.
Want to sit back, relax, and watch comedic cat videos? Blinkx, an online video search engine, wants to help you unleash your inner couch potato.
The British company is redesigning its Web site by adding three new buttons: "Entertain Me," "Inform Me," and "Give Me My Own Channel." The idea is to help people get different classes of videos--entertaining videos, news, and videos related what they've sought before--without having to explicitly search for it.
"You don't have to say what you want. We'll just find it for you. We'll just supply it to you passively, like with TV," said Chief Executive and founder Suranga Chandratillake.
The "more information" button, a.k.a. the geek button, gives the more passive consumer a more control over the individual video and the stream the service queues up for watching.
(Credit: Blinkx)Online video is booming. 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.
Of course the 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 won't put on a lot of ads," he said.
Having tested the new options a bit, I can confirm the service works--and that getting your work done is tough when inundated with a dancing horses, Bruce Lee playing ping-pong with nunchucks, and adorable bunnies in bowls. It's nice that there's a skip-ahead button to pass on the stuff you don't care about, but after a few videos, I got three Paul Hunt transvestite gymnastic comedy routines in a sequence of four videos, and after about 20 videos I started getting repeats. So it looks like Blinkx's algorithm could use some sprucing up.
What I miss: no full-screen mode, no volume adjustment, no ability to rate videos to train the engine what entertaining videos you like (though there is a "similar videos" button), and no ability to click out to the original video if you want to rate it, share it with friends, or leave a comment.
The new Blinkx modes aren't totally passive. While watching the videos, users can click on a "more information button," which Blinkx internally calls the geek button because it enables more control and options for what's showing.
For example, Blinkx analyzes the video content, letting people skip ahead to different scenes via thumbnail images shown in the video player. And the application also can show faces of people in the video, letting users click on them to skip around the video.
The company's service shows video from a variety of sources. In the case of video from about 450 partners, Blinkx hosts it, but some is hosted elsewhere and embedded at the site, and in the case of the search results, Blinkx only offers descriptions and thumbnails that link to other sites' video.
The company has 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.
Miva announced Monday it secured a $10 million credit line, as the digital advertising and media company seeks to expand its brand and introduce a new ad platform amid a troubled economy.
Miva, which received its credit line from a subsidiary of Bridge Capital Holdings, plans to use the proceeds toward expanding its Alot toolbar and homepage brand, as well as its Miva Media ad platform.
The credit line will give some leeway to the company, which initiated a restructuring in the second quarter and announced a 15 percent cut in its workforce.
Miva also rejected the unwelcome advances of British video search site Blinkx in August, saying its buyout offer of $1.20 a share undervalued the company.
"I believe this credit line will provide the company liquidity at this pivotal time in our growth and development," Peter Corrao, Miva's CEO, said in a statement. "I believe it represents an important step in our efforts to expand our Alot toolbar and homepage brand, as well as support the rollout of our new Miva Media ad platform, which we launched in beta earlier this month."
The British video search site Blinkx has offered to acquire Miva, a digital-ad company that sprang out of Web 1.0 search ad firm FindWhat, for a price of $1.20 per share in cash. That's a 54 percent premium over Miva's August 7 closing price of 78 cents.
"A combination of the two companies--fusing Miva's advertising network with Blinkx's ability to leverage its technology portfolio into the online market--presents an exciting and compelling opportunity," a release from Blinkx read. Miva has not yet responded to the offer.
Several months ago, reports surfaced that both Google and News Corp. were interested in acquiring Blinkx, making the publicly traded dot-com's stock spike.
Miva, meanwhile, has been going through some very rough waters. Longtime president and chief marketing officer Seb Bishop resigned on Tuesday. In its offer letter to Miva, Blinkx named "several challenges" that could make the ad firm agree to such a sale: "risk and cost associated with (its) new technology platform, a deteriorating cash position, continued deterioration of (its) Media EU business and continued decline in revenue and profitability."
Suranga Chandratillake
(Credit: Blinkx)Blinkx, whose technology lets people search for videos hosted elsewhere on the Internet, is making it possible for other Web sites to incorporate its search results and share any resulting revenue.
Through a program called Red Label, the company is opening its application programming interface (API) so other sites can pipe video search queries to Blinkx, retrieve the results, and publish them, said Chief Executive and founder Suranga Chandratillake.
"If you have fewer than 10,000 searches per day, you can have access for free. If you have more than 10,000, we ask you to monetize it and share with us," Chandratillake said. Sites can incorporate Blinkx's advertisements and split revenue evenly; those sites that already have monetization under way must work out a specific revenue-sharing plan with the company, he added.
(Credit:
blinkx)
Blinkx already had several one-off search deals with various sites including Ask.com and Lycos, and the Red Label project makes such partnerships easier to set up in the future, Chandratillake said. Blinkx has two new deals with such partners that are using the API: MSN UK and Rambler Media, he added.
Blinkx searches videos not just by examining textual metadata such as titles, tags, and descriptions that accompany videos, but also by performing speech recognition to convert audio to text and by visual recognition that can recognize text and some famous faces in the videos themselves.
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