Blinkx in Video Search Deal with CBS Television Stations

--Also Launches "Search-less" Search Tool

Video search service, Blinkx, has signed a deal with CBS Television Stations Digital Media Group which it says will make thousands of hours of the latter's localized content fully searchable on the Blinkx TV video search portal. Visitors to the portal will now be able to search a range of locally produced video content from CBS-owned TV stations' Web sites, including local news, weather forecasts, entertainment bulletins traffic updates, and current affairs programming. Search queries will link users directly to video segments on the stations' sites. "This partnership will make local video content more accessible than ever before, which is why this relationship with CBS Television Stations is such an exciting development," Blinkx founder and CTO, Suranga Chandratillake, said in a prepared statement. "The video content of the group's 39 local stations will bring more personalized and locally relevant search results to our users throughout the country, and we're delighted to be working with them to make this happen." The CBS Television Stations division's move to make its content searchable on Blinkx TV is part of its "Always On" digital media initiative, whose goal it describes as "expanding the CBS-owned television stations' local, relevant text, graphical and video content to the at-home, on-demand on on-the-move consumer, 24 hours a day." (Note: for an in-depth interview with Chandratillake, see [itvt] Issue 6.53.)

In other Blinkx news: the company has launched a search tool called Pico. Available on the company's Web site as a free, 1MB download, the tool appears as a series of channels on the end-user's desktop, each representing a different type of content: news, blogs, video, Web, Wikipedia, images, and "people" (note: the latter retrieves information from online communities, such as MySpace.com). According to Blinkx, as the end-user works on his/her computer, Pico constantly reads his/her active screen, infers the meaning of what he/she is looking at, based on context, and then dynamically retrieves relevant information from across the Web, including blogs and rich media. The tool is designed to work "invisibly," meaning that the end-user only sees its search results if he/she clicks on a relevant channel. "With Pico, we turned the search paradigm on its head, and asked, 'What if search could be brought to you?,'" Chandratillake said in a statement. "While others, including Microsoft and Apple, have talked about the potential of implicit search before, blinkx has once again pre-empted others by making it reality first. More than anything else, Pico is about the possibility of search-less search."

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