One hundred twenty three million people in the U.S., 70 percent of the online audience, were watching videos in January, according to comScore's Video Metrix Service , but how were they finding the videos they watch? Google and other popular search engines can't be used to find videos because they're text based, but Blinkx , a video search engine, has developed a technology that is better suited to video search.
"We have a unique technology to spider through the Web to read videos," said Suranga Chandratillake, the co-founder of Blinkx. "We analyze them in various ways through speech recognition and visual analysis technology that listens to or watches videos to figure out what they're about. All search engines have focused on the metadata around videos, but they're not watching videos." ( For more information on Blinkx search technology, see the Blinkx white paper .)
Over the past two years Blinkx has used its technology to search seven million hours of content from major media companies, including news content from CNN and the Fox News Channel and entertainment content from MTV and HBO. It also searches user-generated content from YouTube and Google Video, Chandratillake said. "We find the sites that have the content and take you to the video."
Users can go to Blinkx.com to conduct a search. The site looks like a video network, with flashing pictures of recent videos and searches available by subject. But the bulk of Blinkx's business is in syndication. It has distributed its search technology to other sites which are using it to enable searches. Lycos.com, the AOL Education portal and other sites use it, Chandratillake said.
And it is the other sites that are generating ad revenue from it. "We've had little advertising until recently because we viewed it as a showcase demo site," Chandratillake said. "We weren't trying to drive traffic to our site, but we were working with distribution partners."
One of them is Webfetch , a site owned by InfoSpace Europe Ltd., which utilizes Blinkx technology to conduct video searches. When a search is conducted, "the Blinkx rolling thumbnails are shown down the left hand side of the page and relevant paid ads are shown down the right," said Gavin Somers, marketing director of InfoSpace Europe. The ads are text based and not video, like typical search engine ads.
Video search engines present a major opportunity for video advertising, but it's premature, according to Chandratillake. "We know what's going on with video, so we have the ability to put relevant ads there. But there isn't the inventory to make it scale. There isn't a big range of ads for us to make use of our targeting capability. But it is changing and it will happen a lot more in the future."
Reported in Shoot Magazine April 04, 2007
