London-based blinkx is readying such an
ad platform. Called blinkx AdHoc, the new product will launch next Monday as way to target ads alongside or in Web videos based on speech-recognition technology. The program allows advertisers to buy
specific words spoken in videos as well as categories created by analyzing its overall context. The ads--pre-roll, mid-roll or post-roll--will then be delivered to videos appearing on a publisher's
site, selected from their own advertiser inventory, that of an ad network, or blinkx.
Online video is still the fastest-growing segment of the Web, but blinkx CEO Suranga Chandratillake points out that it still lacks "something akin to AdSense for video, which is what we have built." Blinkx is a video search engine that has already indexed some 12 million hours of video. With AdHoc, blinkx hopes to incentivize Web producers to send their videos for indexing in the hopes they can receive meaningful, targeted ad revenue.