VMS Taps Blinkx For Broader Scope In Monitoring

Video search engine blinkx has entered into a technology partnership with news and ad monitoring firm VMS. VMS clients will now have organized access to blinkx's index of an estimated 35 million hours of audio and video Web content.

VMS provides public relations firms, ad agencies, and marketers with integrated news and ad monitoring across all media, including television, radio, Internet, print, blogs, international, outdoor and cinema.

The blinkx partnership is designed to bolster VMS's media intelligence software by helping its clients "access a more holistic understanding of their business environment," according to Peter Wengryn, CEO of VMS.

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.

Seeing continued growth, the company reported 113% year-over-year revenue growth -- or $13.93 million -- in May. But while narrower than ever, marketing and R&D costs still led to a full-year loss of $8.87 million.

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.

Blinkx attempted to snatch up vertically focused PPC engine Miva last summer for a reported $41 million. Miva turned down what it considered the low-ball offer.

According to blinkx, the deal would have been mutually beneficial, as it would have acquired a broader distribution network for its AdHoc video ad platform, while Miva would have gained platform improvements, higher CPMs, and new functionality for its toolbar product.

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