blinkx Unveils Search Engine for TV

blinkx Unveils Search Engine for TV

blinkx TV makes hours of TV content fully searchable from your PC

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 16 /PRNewswire/ -- blinkx, the smartest thing on your computer, today announced the availability of blinkx TV, the first search engine that allows you to search TV across news, sports and entertainment programming. blinkx is the first search engine to make such TV programs fully searchable on demand. Because blinkx captures and indexes the entire video stream directly from the television, consumers can get straight to the exact clip they want. blinkx TV can be accessed at http://www.blinkx.tv/ .

With the launch of blinkx TV, blinkx brings its revolutionary search capabilities to some of the most watched news and entertainment channels. Consumers can now search and access news, movie trailers, popular multimedia segments and other video formats on demand. If you're interested in keeping up to date with breaking news such as the culmination of the Oracle and PeopleSoft acquisition, blinkx TV will bring you the very latest television and radio news quickly and easily from a variety of sources, including BBC, Bloomberg, Fox News and NPR. For news and sports information about the latest college bowl games, blinkx brings you fully searchable content the moment it becomes available. By entering a few words into the query box, consumers are automatically linked to the exact clip they're looking for -- for example, entering "Ocean's Twelve" into the search box would take users to Julia Roberts multimedia files, even if the specific search term wasn't mentioned in the bulletin title.

"blinkx TV fills the gap between the explosion of rich media content and the growing consumer interest in harnessing it. At blinkx we've recognized consumers' needs and taken the search engine to a new level. Ground breaking 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 blinkx founder Suranga Chandratillake. "After launching the world's first Smart Folders and Implicit Query just weeks ago, we're pleased to be bringing even more innovative functionality to our growing user base."

Video Smart Folders (available at http://www.blinkx.tv/ ) enable users to create intelligent folders that continuously populate themselves with multi-media content, based on the parameters set by the user. The result is that users have on demand access to relevant content. Each Video Smart Folder contains content from multiple sources that is specifically relevant to each individual, and acts as a persistent query. If you want to be notified when a news flash becomes available on the latest developments regarding the suspended Indiana Pacers players following their brawl with Detroit Pistons' fans, you can customize a search that will automatically download high quality video to your computer.

"Today's consumers deserve an easier way of finding multimedia online," says blinkx CEO, Mark Opzoomer. "Rich media, like video, is the next step in the evolution of search from Web, to desktop, to living room. Using smart, contextual search, blinkx links users to relevant clips anywhere in the video stream, delivering video content straight from the television to the consumer's PC."

How To blinkx

blinkx thinks while it links. Because blinkx is not constrained by the limits of keyword-based technologies, it is able to extract the main ideas contained within any document and thus derive its meaning. blinkx uses patented Context Clustering Technology (CCT) to overcome the shortcomings of keyword technologies and to truly understand the ideas and context behind the words. blinkx applies its unique CCT ability to make the search experience faster, more accurate and more relevant. Approaches to searching through information using simple keyword query mechanisms fail because they do not provide enough context. In such cases users are overwhelmed by hundreds or thousands of results, all of which match the query, but many that represent the different contexts within which the query term or terms can appear. blinkx CCT is unique because it helps a user provide the context that is crucial to searching or organization -- it does not second-guess a user's needs, but seamlessly provides the automated guidance required to enrich the overall experience.

About blinkx

blinkx, the smartest thing on your computer, is changing the way that people think about search technology. Free-to-download, blinkx automatically and intelligently links to relevant information anywhere and in any format: on the Web or on the desktop. With blinkx, users are no longer limited to Boolean keyword search. Instead, blinkx automatically and implicitly conducts searches, based on the content being viewed by each individual user. blinkx is a privately held firm based in San Francisco and London. More information is available at www.blinkx.com.


Source: blinkx

CONTACT: Julia Blystone of OutCast Communications, +1-415-392-8282, or
julia@outcastpr.com, for blinkx

Web site: http://www.blinkx.com/


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