blinkx picked as RealPlayer's search partner

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 26 June 2007 12:32

Your IT - Home IT

The forthcoming version of RealPlayer will use video search engine blinkx to help users locate material of interest. The announcement comes as blinkx launches its contextual advertising service for video content.

"The new RealPlayer will give people the ability to easily download non-DRM protected videos from thousands of sites, so giving our users access to a best-in-class video search experience is critical,” said Jeff Chasen, RealNetworks' vice president of RealPlayer.

Rather than relying on tags, blinkx uses speech recognition and video analysis to index content.

blinkx currently indexes over 12 million hours of online video from more than 150 partners including Reuters, BBC, ITN, Sky News, Discovery Channel, YouTube, VH1, National Geographic, Ministry of Sound and PBS.

"We are very excited to be powering video search for RealNetworks, a global leader in digital media and entertainment," said Suranga Chandratillake, founder and CEO of blinkx. "Through blinkx's patented speech and pattern recognition technologies, we will be offering their millions of users the most advanced tool for finding videos online."

In related news, blinkx also announced AdHoc, an advertising platform that matches ads with content - much as Google's AdWords delivers ads according to the content of the web pages on which they appear.

"Until now, online video advertising was a kind of Frankenstein's monster - an attempt to cobble together technology that was built for Text Web banner advertising and apply it to an entirely new medium - the Video Web," said Chandratillake.

"The AdHoc platform is revolutionary because it was built from the ground up to address rich media, resulting in higher monetization for media companies, more effective marketing for advertisers and, most importantly, a useful, non-disruptive experience for users."