Video search engine blinkx has been plugging away at video search for years now. Finally, six years after being founded, and already publicly traded on the London stock exchange, it hit profitability for the first time this year. For the six month period ended September 30, revenues doubled to $27 million and it showed its first profit ever of $2 million (or $0.64 per share on a diluted basis).
Blinkx has a small but healthy business powering video search for a growing list of partners, including most recently with UK-based IPTV set-top box maker Amino Communications to power search for Internet TV. The total number of video searches per day it is powering is now 31.6 million, nearly triple the 13.1 million daily average in the same period a year ago. → Read More
There are a vast amount of product comparison sites on the web and a number of social shopping sites that allow online shoppers use their social graph to share purchasing decisions. Today video search engine Blinkx is trying to combine the two functionalities with the launch of Cheep, a social shopping service.
Through a browser add-on (which currently only works on Firefox or IE), Cheep recognizes when you’re looking at a specific product and will show you current price comparisons from around the Web, as well as reviews and ratings. Cheep will appear as a small bar at the top of your screen when you’re looking at a product page. The startup has indexed millions of products nearly 200 online retailers, including Amazon, BestBuy and Walmart, so chances are that Cheep will be able to find the product you are viewing within your browser. → Read More
Behavioral targeting is all the rage with online display advertising right now, and video search engine blinkx is bringing it to video. For the past few years, blinkx has offered contextual video advertising through its Ad Hoc program, which matches ad keywords against a speech-to-text translation of the video, as well as all the tags and titles associated with that video. “We are extending targeting in Ad Hoc from contextual to behavioral,” says CEO Suranga Chandratillake.
He explains the new targeted advertising product in the video below (I caught up with him last week as he was passing through New York City). Overall, blinkx powers 17.5 million video searches a day across its network, which reaches more than 60 million people a month. But for now, the behavioral targeting will work only on blinkx.com, which is a small part of its overall reach. Using cookies, blinkx will assign psychographic profiles to people base don what they watch. It will start with nine profiles, including Yoga Moms, Digital Dads, Gossip Girls, Adventurers, and Infonauts. → Read More
A lot of hopes are being pinned on video search these days as the only remaining source of strong advertising growth. One of the few publicly traded pure-play Web video companies is blinkx, which trades on the London stock exchange, and just announced its half-year earnings for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2008. The company’s revenues rose 115 percent to $6.4 million for the six month period (although the comparison is only partial—see income statement below). It’s gross profit doubled from $2.2 million to $4.5 million.
Although blinkx runs its own video search engine, which is showing a nice ramp in visitors, most of the video searches that blinkx powers are on about 20 partner sites such as Ask.com, Lycos, some Microsoft sites, and Viacom’s AddictingClips. Blinkx indexes more than 32 million hours worth of video from 420 content partners, including most recently People.com, CBS, and Getty Images. Its syndicated video search reached 64 million people and accounted for 668 million pageviews in September, according to comScore. Blinkx is serving up 7 million video searches a day across its network. Here are some stats for the past six months from the company: → Read More
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Blinkx, the video search engine, is getting into video distribution. Today it will launch BBTV, a downloadable player that streams video from content partners using peer-to-peer technology. The initial content lineup is rather spare: forty-odd independent movies from Dogwoof Productions and other videos from existing partners such as Young Holywood (celebrity videos), Kiplinger (financial videos), Shiny Media (fashion videos), ExpertVillage (how-to videos), TurnHere (travel videos), and Mavericks (surfing videos). There are plenty of other P2P video players out there, including Joost, Veoh TV, Vuze, and Babelgum. None have exactly taken the world by storm when compared to video available through the browser. But you can do more inside these custom players, as you can with BBTV, and the viewing experience is much better. Blinkx CEO Suranga Chandratillake gave me a demo last week. He positions BBTV as completely different than Joost: What Joost tried to do from Day One is present itself as a true alternative to regular television. Can you actually do that? It is hard because TV is actually pretty good. If this will be of interest to the average person it has to offer something new and different. Where he tries to be different is with the technology and the experience. With BBTV, you can stream full-length movies to your PC in decent quality. Using Blinkx’s speech-to-text technology, you can see a full transcript of any video and go to that exact part of the video by clicking on any word. “Speech becomes navigation,” says Suranga. You can also jump off to the regular Web by hitting different key strokes to, say, search for a person’s name on Wikipedia or look up something on IMDB. But why not offer the service through a regular Web browser? He is actually agnostic: If you can do it on the browser, you sacrifice certain levels of control and quality, but you get a platform that everybody uses. I don’t think we are wedded only to this experience. To make it fit seamlessly you need to package it. I would not be surprised if we implement this eventually in a browser. That would make BBTV much better. Barring that, a Mac version would be nice. CrunchBase Information blinkx Joost Veoh Babelgum Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Over the past couple days, conversations I’ve had with two different video-startup CEOs—Suranga Chandratillake of blinkx and Nick Grouf of Spot Runner—has got me thinking about what needs to be done to make TV advertising as relevant as video advertising. We have a long way to go, but it boils down to two things: 1) replacing 30-second commercials on TV with relevant ad overlays that pop up at exactly the right moment during a show, and 2) automating the buying, creation and placement of TV ads to make it more like buying search ads. Yesterday, blinkx CEO Suranga Chandratillake dropped by my office and we got to talking about video ads. Blinkx is a video search engine, but it is also building a video ad network called AdHoc that attempts to place contextually-relevant, clickable text ads in a bar above the Web video being watched. For example, in the screen shot of the soccer video above, you will see a text ad for shoes. YouTube is doing something similar with its new AdSense for Video ads. The ads themselves don’t have to be text. They can be banners or logos that pop up, or even new videos-within-a-video under the control of the viewer. The point is that they exist within the main video itself, not after or before it. And they appear briefly at relevant points during a show. Determining whether an ad is relevant for a video is done with some of the same techniques used on Web pages. Both YouTube and blinkx look at the tags and text surrounding a video, but blinkx actually goes beyond what YouTube does. It uses powerful speech-to-text translation technology to create a transcript on the fly and then matches relevant ads to the words. The ads appear as those words are being spoken. Suranga showed me the transcript-creating capabilities of blinkx, which are not visible to users on his regular site, and it was impressive. He clicked on a word in the transcript and that point in the video started to play. Once you can do that, inserting relevant ads is trivial. He says blinkx can also match ads to related concepts extracted from the transcripts. What would it take to run ads like this on regular TV? Even if the ads are not clickable, simple banners or graphical buttons that appear in sync with what you are watching would grab your → Read More
There’s a lot of talk about remunerating video creators these days. Revver’s been doing it a while, along with Metacafe. Blinkx is now monetizing video for publishers too, but unlike YouTube’s recent offering, ,revenue is only split between Blinkx and the publishers. They’re launching an ad network, “Blinkx AdHoc”, that lets publishers serve contextual ads on top of the videos they embed on their sites. All a publisher needs to do is sign up and wrap their video’s player in Blinkx’ ad code you can get here (there’s a full explanation in a video I embedded below). Publishers are paid half of any ad revenue generated from ads served on their site via PayPal. I have a feeling that this product will be popular amongst video submitters for sites like Digg. Behind the scenes, the technology matching ads to the videos comes from Blinkx existing “AdHoc” ad server, which powers the contextual ads served on their own and partner sites (Ask, Real, Lycos, Infospace, Looksmart). AdHoc looks at meta data and parses any speech in the video to match the clip with an appropriate ad. Suranga Chandratillake, co-founder and CTO of Blinkx, says their network has improved ad yields anywhere from 10-150% depending on the content of the video. Short entertainment clips don’t tend to see as much improvement, but longer informational clips see higher gains by picking out advertisements related to the concepts being discussed. Blinkx has done their best to not obstruct the operation and ads of the original player. Ads show up as drop down text links at the top of video or as a static box displayed above the player. It’s very similar to AdBrite’s BritePic product. Before there are screams of indignation over putting ads on someone else’s videos, this doesn’t seem all to different to how video publishers currently make money. They place Google Adsense alongside embeded videos. Other startups have gotten in trouble by materially altering the function of a site’s video player (i.e. Searchles pulling videos out of Grouper’s player). Blinkx doesn’t alter the underlying player, but layers on top of it. Yet it seems a curious reality that in online video, apart from all other media, it has become perfectly acceptable to embed and monetize someone else’s content. On the other hand, creators can choose to not allow embeds of their videos. The bigger problem is whether Blinkx’ network can compete → Read More
It may seem weird, but I’ve been eagerly awaiting the day when I see ads in my viral video. eMarketer expects online video advertising to nearly double in 2008 to $1.3 billion, but no one’s really nailed a scalable ad platform for video. However, Google’s been quietly testing their own system and there are a bunch of other startups tackling it as well. There are a couple key issues they’re all struggling with as they try and generate the greatest amount of ad revenue. There’s still some uncertainty about where to put the ads (pre/post/interstitial?). Even the type or length of the ad is up for debate. A recent study found longer ads were more effective at branding, while conventional wisdom has cast doubt on users sitting through the longer plugs. After deciding on the format, determining the content of the video in order to generate relevant ads is yet another tough problem. It’s also a dire matter for big brands that don’t want to risk being associated with inflammatory content. Finally, these ad platforms will need publishers, advertisers and a marketplace to trade in. Here’s a look at what people are doing in video advertising: Definitely the team to watch, YouTube is treading carefully, experimenting with text ads running along the bottom of the video that users can click on for a full video ad. They’re going to be testing the system with some of their top content producers and word on the street is that the terms are pretty good. Revver splits ad revenue 50/50 with publishers. They run ads at the end of viral videos, which might mean that people are still paying close attention after watching the main content. However, this also means they lose some precious real estate to help drive traffic to other videos on their network like YouTube does. Revver filters the content themselves, tying in the appropriate ads. Similar to Revver, VideoEgg helps publishers deliver and monetize their video inventory. It’s a very hands on approach suitable for larger brands that have tight control over the quality and context of their content. They serve up over 20 million videos daily across their EggNetwork. Ads show up alongside lead ins to other videos as well. ScanScout’s technology scans each video and determines content, with ads delivered contextually to match each scene. They run text ads along the bottom of the videos based on → Read More
We discovered 3 impressive new widgets today, from Google, Blinkx and 30 Boxes, and we decided to write about all of them in one post. Widgets are the non-developer’s “small pieces loosely joined,” they are the hottest example right now of data portability on the web. They are fun and useful. Everyone’s got a “widget strategy.” There are widget marketplaces (see WidgetBox, LabPixies and Wigipedia), widget blogs (see WidgetsLab and Widgetoko). There was a whole conference on widgets earlier this month. Perhaps this post is just us trying to get it out of our system once and for all – but in all likelihood widgets are here to stay. They provide a lot of functionality to website publishers. Widgets are in their infancy, though, and we’re all still learning how to best use them. After this I promise to never embed 3 widgets in one blog post again. Blinkx Wall Audio and video search engine Blinkx now lets website publishers place a wall of search result previews on any site using a widget. The Wall below displays search results for the phrase Net Neutrality. Give it a chance to load, it’s way too slow, hopefully that can be improved. The display is fed by RSS – so its contents will change as new search results become available. It could be over the top, but the size and number of nodes in the wall can be changed – this is the “tiny” version. I’ve used Blinkx feeds in the past to create, for example, a page listing the most recent audio and video news about Zimbabwe. This Blinkx Wall is a much more interesting way to display search results. The down side of this is that search results often include video that’s been removed for copyright reasons – video producers certainly wouldn’t want search driving viewers to their work (albeit on other sites). We found out about this widget at Beet.TV, one of the best places to learn about video online. “Net Neutrality” in the News http://www.blinkx.com/w?g_StageWidth=280&g_StageHeight=240&&g_ApiServer=www.blinkx.com&g_sImgServer=http://us-store.blinkx.com&g_sApiQuery=%2Fapi%2Fstart.jsp%3Faction%3Dquery%26databasematch%3Dmedia%26totalresults%3Dtrue%26text%3DNet%2BNeutrality%26start%3D1%26maxresults%3D100%26sortby%3Drelevance%26fieldtext%3DBIAS%7B1163632159%2C1000000%2C20%7D%3Aautn_date%2520AND%2520BIAS%7B1163632159%2C10000000%2C20%7D%3Aautn_date&TimeStamp=1163632159&g_ApiTunnelPath=/f/ Two more widgets, from Google and 30 Boxes, after the fold. → Read More
Old school search company Lycos will announce this morning that it’s partnering with video search company Blinkx to power video search on Lycos.com. The video search feature is available now. Everybody wants to nail down video search these days, but Blinkx has some interesting technology. This is the second move by Lycos we’ve reported on this month – new giant email rivaling Gmail’s storage was the first. Blinkx stands out because it indexes not just text metadata but also the spoken word in video footage via speech recognition. The company reported this summer that it’s now indexed more than 4 million hours of audio and video content. Thus the new Lycos video search page also includes the option to search audio content as well. It’s a lot like Podzinger but for international video, with an emphasis on educational content. Blinkx CTO Suranga Chandratillake told me today that if it’s Brittany Spears you want then it’s Brittany Spears you’ll get at Blinkx – but if it’s a particular phrase being used by Condaleeza Rice on TV, then Blinkx’s technology is really what you are looking for. Just search once and subscribe to the results feed, because you don’t want to go back more than once to the site until it undergoes the redesign Chandratillake tells me is coming. (The UI is injurious.) Google Video isn’t actually a Google (search the web) for video, Chandratillake says, and so Blinkx seeks to be. I like Blinkx’s search results, I’ve subscribed to several feeds from them for some time and I go to them every time I want to do news video search. I hope that the emerging importance of video search will propel them, or someone with similar technology, past the world of trashy content and marginal partnerships. Perhaps this deal with Lycos will be a good fresh beginning in a new era when video search is believed to be important. → Read More
