Video Search Engine Offers ‘Personalised TV’

Video search engine Blinkx has become the latest operator to provide personalised web TV feeds to users, launching its My Blinkx.tv service with the potential to deliver thousands of hours of user generated content.

The move echoes that of others in the field, such as Google which unveiled its plans to amass an online library of programmes which can be searched and viewed online from any computer last week (see Google To Host Online TV Service).

Telecoms giant BT has also been developing plans for personalised TV channels, centring their content around families or small interest groups, although it has yet to roll out any practical demonstration of the technology (see BT Plans To Revolutionise TV With Personal Channels).

The new Blinkx service allows users to create and maintain video weblogs, as well as saving specific search topics to their own “channels” which are automatically updated as new content becomes available.

Personalised channels can be viewed either as a single stream of video, or as ‘chunks’ downloaded to PCs or portable devices.

Footage uploaded to Blinkx is automatically converted to the Flash format, given an automatic audio transcript for easy searching and normalised to make its volume level match that of other clips on the system. Once this process is complete, the footage is made available for others to search and view on demand.

Explaining the system, Blinkx founder Suranga Chandratillake said: “There’s been a huge amount of noise about IPTV, but we’ve yet to see any real progress in this area. At Blinkx, we believe that IPTV should combine the interactive, customisable experience of the Internet, with the simple, seamless way we watch TV – with my blinkx.tv, we are collaborating with our users to experiment with how we think that might look.”

Blinkx: www.blinkx.com