Long ago, the “small screen” referred to your TV, in contrast to the silver one in movie theaters. But a new small screen is growing in importance: the computer monitor of your local PC or laptop. More and more video is being offered over the Internet. Desktop search engine blinkx thinks it has a better way to help users find it. And the company backed that belief last January with the launch of blinkx.TV.com, a Web site for Web video seekers.
Not that others aren’t willing to help you locate that clip of the Johnny Carson-Ed Ames tomahawk throw. In quick succession, last December, Yahoo announced it was beta testing a video search capability, and Google followed soon after. Meanwhile, Singingfish, which AOL bought in 2003, launched a multimedia search engine on its Web site.
But Suranga Chandratillake thinks blinkx.TV is better, and the blinkx founder and CTO sums up the reason in two words: voice recognition. “Blinkx has created unique capabilities to literally listen to the audio of media on the Web and pull out what people are saying and use that to create a transcript, which we can then search,” he says.
Both Yahoo and Singingfish rely on text descriptions of the video for their search. “That assumes that the video content you’re searching for is very well described by the text on the Web page around the clip,” Chandratillake says. “Both of those are pretty weak assumptions.” And Google’s TV beta indexes the transcripts of closed captioned television clips and shows on the Web. That’s fine for the approximately 10% of U.S. TV that is currently captioned, but again depends heavily on the accuracy of that captioning. In addition, closed captioning is broken into 30-second bites, so basing a search on it means that you can’t jump straight to the sound bite you’re searching for.
Blinkx.TV, which is available as either a downloadable search toolbar or on the Web site, employs voice recognition to “listen” to a clip, then overlays context on that to make educated guesses what a speaker is talking about. Simple voice recognition won’t do the job, Chandratillake points out. After all, a phrase like “recognize speech” sounds to even our human ears very much like “wreck a nice beach”; we figure out which one is correct by evaluating whether it occurs in a conversation about technology or the environmental impact of oil spills. Blinkx.TV combines both sounds and context to create highly accurate transcripts, then indexes those for search.
Besides providing a useful tool for users, the blinkx approach may make it easier for content providers, too, since they won’t incur the upfront expenses of creating reliable descriptions and transcripts of their programming. That’s a lot of capital expense to ask of content providers who are not even sure Internet video can make a profit for them. “When we turn up on their doorstep, we can just say, ‘Show us where your content is, and we will index it,’” he says. “It’s easy for the content owners, and it lets us offer users massive amounts of great content.”
Chandratillake says that many content owners are interested in the possibility of reliable, usable Internet video search, because they’re in turn detecting interest from the advertisers who underwrite their TV programming. “Content owners are desperate for ways to make the Internet a viable distribution channel for their content, because they know they can sell advertising on that channel,” he says. “Forget the keyword marketing, forget the banner ads. General Motors would like to have a car ad that plays before a broadband video clip.”
With a workable search method in place, content owners will be more willing to push their product onto the Internet. Blinkx.TV already has a contract with Fox News, which has been mounting 30 to 40 clips a day on its Web site since early 2004. When those clips were taken out of circulation, they were simply unavailable to searchers; now blinkx.TV is making them available again over the Web. Blinkx.TV is working on other content deals with SkyTV, National Public Radio and the BBC.
Users who also download the blinkx desktop toolbar can also use “Smart Folders”, a proprietary function that will go out and look for Web content that fits a particular description—clips about Formula 1 racing, for example, or discussions of Google’s share price and quarterly earnings. The intelligent directory grew out of blinkx’s desktop search engine; but in the context of video search, it can function more like TiVo for the Web.
As for how blinkx.TV—or for that matter the blinkx desktop search toolbar-- will make money, that’s still up in the air. “Although it’s nice to be able to pick one business model that will undoubtedly rule the world, practicality wins out in the end, so we have different models for the different operational modes of our technology,” Chandratillake says. Users of the Web search might be driven to content owners’ Web sites, and blinkx.TV could earn either by delivering that traffic or by some revenue-sharing deal on either subscription fees or micropayments for content—a few dollars to download a single “Simpsons” episode, for example.
The blinkx toolbar lends itself to a more traditional paid-placement model for contextual ads when users are doing a commercial search, and in fact blinkx has been testing that mode with some of its beta providers.
But privately-held blinkx isn’t feeling any pressure to make a dollar just yet, Chandratillake says, and would almost rather hold back and make a bigger impact by turning on a number of business models at once. The company’s current aim is to have one or more revenue models up and running by the end of 2Q 2005; which one will depend on its analysis of usage over the next few months.
Of course, another way to make money with search technology is to license it or sell it outright, but Chandratillake says the San Francisco-based company is determined to retain its independence. “The way we’re doing video search is so different that it would be difficult for other existing players to fit into the way they look at the world,” he says. “We’ve been very aggressive about figuring out how to go it alone.”
And the inspiration for that independent spirit comes from rival search firm Google. “The great thing about the Google story is that it demonstrates that with even a very small technological advantage, if you can deliver more of what the user really wants, then you can still succeed against the multi-million dollar marketing budgets of the big players,” Chandratillake says. “Co-existence works—it’s a matter of having something compelling on the site.”