French TV Says 'Oui' to blinkx

Multimedia search engine blinkx announced today its partnership with French international news channel FRANCE 24, in which blinkx users will be able to access the broadcaster’s library of programming at blinkx.com. Using its AdHoc platform, which combines speech recognition and video analysis, blinkx will place targeted ads around the FRANCE 24 footage and split the revenue with the broadcaster. 

In recent months, blinkx has been leveraging its search technology and striking similar partnerships with other media companies, most recently the British video content provider ITN Source. According to blinkx founder and CEO Suranga Chandratillake, the search engine has worked with around 200 to 250 content companies to implement multimedia search. 

Revenue from targeted advertising notwithstanding, leveraging multimedia search leads to direct, hard ROI. "The more searches there are, and the more applicable searches there are, the more videos get found," Chandratillake says. "And that leads directly to more videos being viewed and almost all of the customers we have have some sort of business model based around the videos viewed, either because of ads next to videos or because they charge for the videos."

According to Chandratillake, sites where blinkx is live has experienced increased traffic, which indicates the usability and usefulness of the engine. "Obviously, if people don’t find it more useful, they go away or don’t use it as much, or use it the same as they used to before," he says.

And with the explosion of multimedia content available on the web, there’s greater need to leverage technology that can siphon through it both quickly and accurately.