As Jimmy Durante used to say, ev'rybuddy wantsta giddinta the act – and video search isn't immune to that maxim. Just days after Yahoo said they were working on a video search engine, upstart blinkx has launched one in beta.
"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," said company founder Suranga Chandratillake in a formal statement.
Blinkx grabs and indexes video and audio streams from television and radio to give you news, sports, and entertainment clips, letting you group specific searches using "smart folders" collecting content continuously from several high-profile sources, blinkx said.
Those sources include Fox News, Home Box Office, ESPN, National Public Radio, and the BBC World Service, with more anticipated to join in, the company added.
The Smart Folders – which users can create from their own search queries or from individual results received, placing them where file folders would be kept – let users see or hear clips and Web sites dealing with exactly the topics they want, blinkx said, with automatic updates based on those criteria as new information becomes available.
"Once you've trained a Smart Folder, so that it knows what type of information you want it to store, it automatically gets smarter over time as it continually scans for new information and automatically updates itself," the company continued. "You don't need to remember a particular word or filename, if content is available, it is automatically brought to you without you having to even know of its existence."
Google is now said to be recording and indexing television program for searchable shows online, and Microsoft is also said to be developing video search.
