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BlinkX, Video Search, and the Corporate Shell Game

The Financial Times broke the news, but Mashable summed it up more succinctly: $20 and a free pony if you can figure this one out.

The demerger of the consumer business is a complex transaction, in which Autonomy will first take ownership of Blinkx, a separate company founded by Autonomy’s former US chief technology officer, Suranga Chandratillake, which already uses Autonomy’s consumer search technology. In exchange Blinkx will be given exclusive rights to the technology, everywhere outside China. Then the Blinkx business will be demerged again and floated. [From the FT article]

Sounds like an complicated way for Suranga Chandratillake to take a pay day while keeping shareholders happy. Or something.

Meanwhile, try using Blinkx. Personally, I found the search results from YouTube alone a lot better: less clutter in the results, more relevance.

BlinkX for “Nissan Skyline.”
YouTube for “Nissan Skyline.”

BlinkX results are full of a bunch of remote-controlled car stuff - not what I was looking for. Plus, the BlinkX interface, with preview videos playing unsolicited, video thumbnails, and so on, is distracting to the point of making the site painful to use - however technically impressive it may be. Say what you will about the aesthetics/usability of YouTube, but its better than BlinkX.

Finally, BlinkX doesn’t seem to be indexing YouTube properly either. The result sets from each don’t match, and I have no idea how BlinkX ranks video results from one site over another anyway. When it comes right down to it, BlinkX seems counter-intuitive, dis-organized, and a confusing way to find video. This is the fate I fear for CastTV.

blinkx, casttv, mashable, mergers, video youtube

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CastTV - is there room between verticals and gootube?

I got into a little back and forth on Mike’s post on TechCrunch about CastTV (see the original TechCrunch CastTV post too). CastTV is a video search engine - indexing video from top video sites (YouTube, etc, etc), as well as across the Internet.

CastTV brings some unique twists to the table with their indexing system - it accumulates index data about a video across the internet, for instance - i.e.: if the video is posted in 15 different places, CastTV will treat the video as a single, indexed entity, with fifteen logical locations, as opposed to 15 different entities with different keywords, etc. According to TechCrunch, CastTV also allows for comparison shopping between download sites.

Anyway - my basic conjecture is that CastTV is another Riya - a cool technology in search of a business in a hype-heavy segment. Riya went from a buzz superstar facial recognition technology powerhouse to a marginal “visual search” tool (at Like.com) that let’s you search the internet for handbags you might like or rugs with nice patterns.

My conjecture is based on the fact that between YouTube/GVid and iTunes, most video on the web is well indexed, and keyword, tag, and genre searches, as well as social recommendations, meet most everyone’s search needs. Perhaps if the user-submitted video market becomes more fragmented over time (with an ascendant MySpace video or Photobucket), there may be a case for CastTV. Similarly, if CastTV wanted to delve into the grey market waters of torrents and P2P, it might have more appeal. But as a largely meta-search engine for the top video sites, I question why I would go to CastTV instead of the site where I know CastTV is going to return its listings from anyway.

My other thought is that the specialized searches for which CastTV will have the most appeal will be better executed by vertical sites such as SuTree.com that specialize in a particular video niche.

So - for mainstream searches, I’m seeing CastTV as redundant, and for specialized searches, I see it outgunned by dedicated vertical sites. That being said, I’m very willing to be proven wrong, and happily requested a preview invitation. The other suggestion I made in the TechCrunch comment thread was that CastTV deploy its unique indexing technology elsewhere - using the cross-internet-meta-index for keywords and phrases would at the very least provide a hype alternative to Powerset for the google-pundits.

Note: Here’s what I mean about being proven wrong. Maybe Like.com and the Riya team are finding their footing?

bittorrent, casttv, google, like, p2p, powerset, riya, techcrunch, video, visualsearch youtube

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