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.
AT&T isn't the brand that comes to mind when you think of online video search, but let's get past that point: the telecommunications company has announced a beta version of a site called VideoCrawler, which can search more than 1,600 online video outlets. AT&T hasn't released a full list of compatible video sites, but Google's YouTube is one of them.
VideoCrawler was developed in conjunction with start-up Divvio, a search company that constructed the VideoCrawler platform.
VideoCrawler doesn't host any videos, but members can still compile playlists and share them through embeddable widgets.
Other players in this space include Blinkx and the AOL-owned Truveo.
Let's face it: Video search blows. It's easy to use YouTube's search box to find straightforward Internet video memes like cats playing pianos, skateboard tricks, or Rick Astley remixes; try for anything more intricate and you might be out of luck. There are established companies in the space, like the U.K.-based Blinkx, but none of them has captured the market share that video search potentially could.
Enter VideoSurf, a company launching later on Wednesday at the TechCrunch50 conference that's been getting a choice spot in the tech-blogger limelight thanks to a Los Angeles Times preview.
VideoSurf CEO Lior Delgo told the Times that instead of only being able to search text tags and descriptions, the company's search technology goes frame-by-frame to recognize specific people. Additionally, VideoSurf says it has already indexed multiple video sites, from hubs like YouTube and Hulu to the digital libraries of networks like Comedy Central and ESPN. The company has attracted investment funding from former Vice President Al Gore and Joel Hyatt, the co-founders of Current Media; Hyatt is chairman of VideoSurf's board of directors.
But there's a caveat: nobody in the tech press has actually seen this company in action yet. Search Engine Land was very impressed by a demo, calling the company "genuinely radical," but doesn't appear to have done anything hands-on. The last shadowy video company that was this hyped was arguably Joost, which is still trying to stay afloat after failing to catch on. So don't count the chickens before they hatch, even if we're talking about a grainy cell phone camera video of chickens playing "Never Gonna Give You Up" on a piano.
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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