You know how I am always on about search and video – how I think search naturally will become the interface to buying content. Another paving stone has been laid in that road with the news that Blinkx and Movielink are hooking up. From the LA Times article (reg req’d):
The two companies plan to announce today that Movielink, a downloading service owned by five major studios, will make its pictures available through the Blinkx search engine.
No money is changing hands in the deal, executives with the companies said. Movielink will get additional exposure, and Blinkx will get access to movies that other search engines lack.
Blinkx uses speech-recognition and other technologies to make a searchable index of trailers for the movie service’s nearly 1,000 titles. The company hopes to expand the index to include dialogue from the movies themselves — so that, one day, users who type “I’ll be back” will find “The Terminator” and be able to download it for a $3.99 rental.
Blinkx release.
I agree that search and video will come together, but buying movies on demand based on quotes and phrases sounds silly to me. It’s the same thing as thinking search is all about looking for keywords in a page. Today, a google search for “I’ll be back” already brings up The Terminator in the first result. I just can’t download it yet- and that’s not really a problem for too many people. Also, I haven’t heard it covered anywhere that Blinkx, led by Autonomy’s former CTO, is Autonomy’s customer and is using their IDOL suite of software (which now includes Virage and Dremedia). Sounds like an Autonomy story unless I’m missing something.
It seems that everything that Blinkx does is either in preparation by Google, Yahoo et al or is already being done by others. The big SEs have the critical mass that Blinkx does not have. I wonder if Microsoft would consider taking them over in a bid to get more of a search market share?