Video Search & Ad Factors
Author: Jay DeragonTHE DISRUPTION: Web video search and ad insertion
THE DISRUPTED: Search engines and the TV ad business
The largest segment of Internet advertising, thanks to Google, is search. And the fastest-growing segment is video. We've been conducting research and analysis on several companies who appear to have created unique video technology.
The objective is to enable user centric functions and features such as ad insertion for videos on social networks as a means for economic gains for the user. (See post http://jayderagon.com/blog/?p=266)
San Francisco-based Blinkx believes that by putting together video search and ad insertion, it can create a business that is greater than the sum of its parts. Blinkx is a video search engine that indexes more than 14 million hours of video available on the Web, everything from YouTube clips to old episodes of Seinfeld. Blinkx's special sauceâ€"something even Google doesn't haveâ€"is software that can turn speech into text and count how many times a word pops up in a video.
This is very useful to anyone selling targeted ads for, say, Junior Mints.Blinkx can also cluster videos together by topic.In June, Blinkx announced a video advertising service called AdHoc, which CEO Suranga Chandratillake, borrowing a phrase from Google's business model, describes as "AdSense for video." The ads can take many forms: clickable "bugs" that crawl across the screen, banners that appear around the video, and, perhaps most innovative, a list at the end of the video of all the products mentioned in it.
This fall Chandratillake will try out the ad system in his own peer-to-peer Internet video service, Blinkx Broadband TV.Blinkx faces some formidable challengers: Google and Yahoo have not given up on video search. But video is a different beast than the rest of the Web, and Blinkx has shown that it knows how to hunt it. If Blinkx can stay ahead of its giant rivals, it could one day take on regular TV. "It is only a matter of time before cable and satellite providers let you forage beyond the set-top box," Chandratillake says. "When that happens, you will need a really good search engine."
Founded in 2004 by Suranga Chandratillake, the company completed a tremendously successful IPO on the London Stock Exchange (AIM) in May, 2007 and currently has a market capitalization of US$350M*, with headquarters in San Francisco, CA and the UK.Blinkx has built a reputation as the Remote Control for the Video Web. Now, with an index of over 14 million hours of searchable video and more than 200 media partnerships, including national broadcasters, commercial media giants, and private video libraries, it has cemented its position as the premier destination for online TV. Blinkx pioneered video search on the Internet, developing an engine based on technology that was conceived at Cambridge University, enhanced by $150M in R&D over 12 years, and is now protected by 111 patents.
Unlike other multimedia search engines that attempt to re-purpose technology built for the Text Web, blinkx uses a unique combination of patented conceptual search, speech recognition and video analysis software to efficiently, automatically and accurately find and qualify online video.Today, blinkx is the world's largest single index of rich media content on the Web, delivering more content from a broader range of sources than either Google or Yahoo!All of this content is now available to viewers around the world with an unprecedented degree of flexibility and personalization. At www.blinkx.com, users can search for video content, create personal video playlists, or build a customized Video Wall for their blog or MySpace page.
Blinkx continues to pioneer innovative new approaches to digital video distribution in order to ensure it offers the most advanced capabilities and delivers the highest value to its audiences and partners. (http://www.blinkx.com)
These developments and others is just another factor emerging with many other factors which will usher in The Relationship Economy where users will create their own economic gains for their time, talent and contributions within social networks.
What say you?
www.reationship-eonomy.com