blinkx video search engine 'thinks while it links'
I spoke with Chandratillake about the technology blinkx uses to search “over 4,000,000 hours of audio, video, podcast, vlog and television” and how blinkx plans to capitalize on its technology.
blinkx currently processes an average of 3.5 million searches daily via blinkx.TV destination video search engine, blinkx Pico desktop search tool and co-branded “powered by blinkx” partnerships, such as “Times Online Smart Search.”
Chandratillake is a specialist in distributed processing architectures. Prior to founding blinkx, he served as Autonomy Corporation’s US CTO.
According to Chandratillake, "blinkx thinks while it links":
Using automatic transcription technology that transcribes content on the fly or faster than real-time, blinkx TV gives you on demand access to hours of news and entertainment content.
Free to consumers, blinkx.TV is populated by automatic spiders that crawl the web for audio video content and by content partnerships with over 100 content and media companies, such as HBO, The New York Times, Business Week, Virgin Radio, Sundance Channel, YouTube…
Chandratillake presents the blinkx platform as follows:
Through the use of fast server-based audio/video-capture cards and a linearly scalable architecture, the blinkx TV platform seamlessly assimilates audio and video from multiple sources such as terrestrial television aerials, satellite television feeds, cable TV, analog and digital radio and Internet-based content.
Once connected to media channels, blinkx TV multi-threaded servers use advanced image and audio analysis to automatically extract information about videos in real time and create a rich index about the video content.
A precise, time-stamped index provides fine-grained access to the video content that can be used to search and efficiently locate a specific video segment for playback. The blinkx TV server simultaneously indexes and digitizes (encodes) the input channel in order to transform the video and audio assets into web-ready accessible content.
blinkx is privately held and based in San Francisco, California and London, England. Chandratillake founded and self-funded the company in 2004. Since its founding, blinkx has obtained approximately $12 million in angel investor funding. blinkx employs 29 people.
The blinkx business model targets contextually relevant advertsing revenues and the company aims to syndicate its search platform to large Internet portals, on a revenue share basis.