Blinkx Continues Growth

Suranga Chandratillake

Driven by strong traffic numbers, online video search company blinkx on Wednesday posted a narrower loss year-over-year. For the year ended March 31, the company posted a pretax loss of $8.9 million -- compared with a loss of $9.3 million a year ago. Revenue, meanwhile, increased 140% to $33.7 million.

Year-over-year, video searches increased a whopping 169% to 22.6 million searches per day in March, while video streams in the UK and U.S. grew by 186%.

"While we remain mindful of the macroeconomic environment, blinkx is now well-positioned in one of the fastest-growing segments of the media sector," Suranga Chandratillake, founder and CEO of blinkx, said Wednesday.

In fiscal 2010, Blinkx saw its CPM rates rise from $16.25 to $16.50, largely driven by blue-chip brands like Coca Cola, Virgin, Toyota, Microsoft and McDonald's.

According to blinkx, repeat campaign bookings grew by 193% year-over-year, in addition to strong increase of 112% in brands advertising with blinkx. The company now claims to work with some 800 brands.

By and large, analysts remain bullish on blinkx. "Blinkx has continued to outgrow the wider online ad market, helped by the shift of advertising dollars towards video formats, and the greater consumption of video content online," Piper Jaffray analyst Rajeev Bahl said in a research note.

Also on Wednesday, blinkx launched the beta version of its mobile video search engine. Since its launch in 2004, blinkx's reason-for-being has been to develop an efficient, scalable way to search the millions of hours of video now flooding the Web.

Employing technology that "listens" to the speech track of a given video, blinkx videos are now accompanied by speech tags to complement text meta-data tags. As such, users can now find videos by specific spoken words, and then jump to the exact point in the videos when those words are uttered.

Blinkx's facial recognition technology identifies and catalogs recognizable faces within videos, and presents users with thumbnails of the different faces that appear in a given video.

In addition, blinkx's technology detects scene changes, and matches videos that share similar visual components. For example, news videos on the presidential inauguration might come from different television networks, but if they share similar scenes from the event, then blinkx presents the videos as a set of related results.

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