Blinkx Releases AdHoc, Forms New Partnerships

As reported last week, Blinkx today officially unveiled its new contextual ad matching technology for video content, known as AdHoc. The company has also partnered with both Lycos and InfoSpace to provide its video search technology as an additional feature to these sites’ search interfaces.

The InfoSpace partnership will actually bring Blinkx video search to Dogpile, its meta-search engine that recently received a face-lift and should continue to see functional enhancements. Meanwhile, the Lycos partnership will bring Blinkx video search technology to its site to allow users to create personalized playlists of video content from various sources, including YouTube, Google Video, MySpace and any other online video source.

These are the latest in a long line of examples that show video to be an increasingly popular and must-have feature for search engines. This is especially relevant given the market reaction and competition that could begin to surround the universal search concept Google has begun to push. This basically involves moving beyond text-dominated search results to serve various formats, including video, for search queries.

Google has both Google Video and YouTube, and AOL has Truveo. For many of the remaining search engines out there that will try to stay competitive with video search, a handful of branded video search engines and technologies will likely be tapped (or acquired) to do the job.

This will bode well for Blinkx as it is a leader in this space, and one that has recently emboldened its value proposition with an ad matching technology (AdHoc) and a clear-cut monetization strategy. It’s hard to tell after one day how well this will work in matching ads to video clips, but it is an intriguing addition to a solid video search product (see last week’s post for details). We’ll keep a close eye on it.