Blinkx unveils video search engine-Guns for Google

The beta offering, dubbed Blinkx TV, captures and indexes video and audio streams directly from television and radio broadcasters to make available news, sports and entertainment clips, the company said. The engine lets people group specific searches using "smart folders" that continuously collect multimedia content from sources including Fox News, HBO, ESPN, National Public Radio and the BBC World Service.

You can think of Blinkx TV as the Google for multimedia content on the internet - this audio and video search tool is more powerful, feature-rich and relevant than any other player in the market.

Through Blinkx, one can search and watch the latest news videos, podcasts and TV content from most media companies including Forbes, Reuters, BBC, ABC News, CBS, MSNBC, USA Today and so on. You can even search user-generated content available on video sharing sites like Blip.TV, Metacafe, etc.

"Groundbreaking automatic transcription technology, which transcribes content straight from the cable box on the fly or from video already stored on the Web, together with advanced phonetic matching speech recognition technology, automate the process of searching TV clips for the first time," Blinkx founder Suranga Chandratillake said in a statement.


The most amazing feature of Blinkx TV is that it shows a short 3 second preview of each video clip in the search results. That makes it very easy to scan the search results because you get a fairly good idea about the target video without having to load it in your browser. You can also switch to movie mode and play the videos back to back.

And Blinkx also provides an RSS feed for each of the search results - that helps you track video stories on any topic directly in your newsreader. Definitely worth a place in your Bookmarks folder.

Blinkx already claims to be the world’s largest video search engine, but yesterday it reached new heights – 14,000,000 hours of searchable video, audio, viral and TV content.

Chandratillake told that Google has both technically and strategically attacked the video hosting model rather than the video search model. "They are doing a little more video search now, but it's still pretty half-hearted compared to what they've thrown into the video hosting and video sharing model."

He went on to say the opportunity for those that want to leverage video without going through YouTube is huge because large companies are wary of working with Google. He also noted that Yahoo doesn't have video search and that Microsoft's MSN has a poor video search tool.
So, while the rumors run wild that Google may have eyed blinkx in the past, it sounds more like Chandratillake and Co. are angling for their own slice of the market, or perhaps a comfy exit strategy into the arms of Yahoo or Microsoft.