Blinkx.com - Overview and History of Blinkx Video Search

Blinkx.com is an Internet based search engine for video, audio, and other multimedia content. It was founded by Suranga Chandratillake, a former Autonomy employee. Blinkx started its operations in 2003, based in San Francisco, as video search and toolbar for web search, which allows searching and organization/classification of audio and video clips as well as other streaming media. Blinkx's technology is unique in that it uses speech recognition to analyze the audio inside of the video, and then use the text and phonetic text transcripts in order to match videos to the search term submitted. Blinkx touts itself as the largest Video search and video sharing site. Blinkx has over 12 million hours of indexed video content and more than 130 contracts and agreements in place with video content providers.

It powers sites like Lycos, Infospace and parts of AOL. In October 2006, Microsoft announcement that it will use Blinkx to power the video search functionality on some parts of MSN and Live.com. On June 3rd, 2007 it announced it was also powering video search on Ask.com. Blinkx search engine notifies users when it finds and indexes new video content from the web that matches a keyword query previously performed.

The RSS alert system, called SmartFeed on Blinkx's website has been added recently. Following when a user submits a search query for a relevant term on Blinkx TV, they will be prompted with the option of setting up an RSS alert for that query. Users can also choose to opt into receiving video content rss alerts for any keyword search term from Blinkx TV's more than 30 audio and video channels. Besides indexing videos from many different commercial providers, Blinkx TV also features amateur audio clips, podcasts, and videos taken from all over the web. Just yesterday, Blinkx and Eurekster announced a partnership.

Blinkx is rapidly signing deals with television content networks. This signals a strategy of becoming the preferred front end video search provider for major media companies. Blinkx has formed a video content partnership with Reuters. Reuters is expected to permit users with on-demand access to their hours and hours worth of news video content. Blinkx is also expected to index the content, and then send users back to Reuters.com to actually view the content. This allows Reuters to exhibit a certain level of control as well as giving them the direct ability to track and monitor usage. This business development approach allows Blinkx to circumvent the various intellectual property issues that have recently even blindsided Google.

Blinkx TV also inked a deal with The One Network for fashion, music, sports, and entertainment video clips. The one Network features promotional content such as movie trailers and celebrity interviews. The One Network digital content has been available on-demand via links in Blinkx.tv's search results since March of this year.

Blinkx has recently launched "my blinkx.tv," a service that combines the startup's strong and popular video search engine with user personalization and UGC (user generated content) features. In so doing, blinkx adds momentum to the creeping convergence of the Internet and television.

My blinkx.tv allows its users to upload video content and store their vlogs free of charge. However Blinkx.tv takes video searching in a new direction in that it allows users to save their keyword queries as a video "channel". This way, their channel and query will be updated with relevant video content on an ongoing basis. For example, the keyword query can be used to group a variety of keyword-related vlogs (video blogs), newscasts, and amateur home movies as series of video segments.