The search engine Blinkx (www.blinkx.com) announced on December 20 the launch of a beta version of its own video search engine, one day after Yahoo released Yahoo! Video Search (http://video.search.yahoo.com). The service, dubbed Blinkx TV (www.blinkx.tv), makes news, sports, and entertainment easily searchable in transcript form by capturing and indexing video and audio streams directly from TV and radio broadcasters.
Users of Blinkx TV can now group specific searches using "smart folders" that continuously collect multimedia from providers like Fox News, HBO, ESPN, NPR, and the BBC World Service. Blinkx's patented context clustering technology overcomes the limitations of simple keyword methods.
Blinkx founder Suranga Chandratillake said that the main difference between Blinkx TV search and other video search tools is that Blinkx TV searches satellite feeds, not just video on the Web, and that 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.
