• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, July 5, 2005

America Online has entered into partnerships for video content from companies including HBO, New York Times digital, Warner Bros. Online, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the Times' About.com, Movielink, Broadway.com, CollegeHumor.com, and Jokaroo.com, AOL is expected to announce today.

AOL sees the broad array of video content partners, including those owned by parent company Time Warner, as critical to its efforts to compete against Yahoo! and Google for dominance in online video search distribution.

"Having good content partnerships, which is basically in our DNA, is crucial to success," said Fred McIntyre, vice president of video operations at AOL.

AOL Video, the company's video-on-demand service, which was launched late last week, allows subscribers as well as non-subscribers to search and play back more than 15,000 licensed and originally produced videos from Time Warner, including TV programs and music videos, Warner Bros. movie trailers, and news clips from CNN and MSNBC, among other sources.

AOL plays back the content in a proprietary video player, but visitors don't have to download an application.

AOL's existing audio/video search engine Singingfish will accompany the service by directing users to content from across the broader Internet. Singingfish, which it acquired two years back, was never meant to be AOL's video offering for the mass market, McIntyre said.

"Singingfish is amazingly customizable and advanced in its search capabilities, but AOL Video is more appropriate for engaging with the broader consumer market," he said.

Since making its content generally available on the Web last month, AOL has begun an aggressive bid for the broadest market possible in order to maximize ad revenue.

And while McIntyre and his associates will certainly cash in on advertisers' robust demand for video inventory on which to place their ads, he recognizes the challenges that still face AOL's ad-supported model.

"With regard to video advertising, we're still doing a lot of research to find the right balance, but a two-to-one, content-to-ad ratio is the current standard," McIntyre said. "Anyone who says they've found the perfect ground in video between the demands of advertisers and consumers is either lying or clueless."

AOL also announced that it is developing a "video hub," or a specialized page for watching the latest multimedia content, which should launch sometime this summer.

The technology for AOL Video includes speech-to-text processing that enables not only searches by title, description, and artist, but also searches for keywords within the body of video. The technology combines internal software developed by AOL and Singingfish, which specializes in scouring the Web for video and audio content and then pointing visitors to sites where they can play back the media.

What's the practical purpose for such partnerships? Making the content navigable, according to McIntyre. "Getting the meta data is really the essence of these partnerships," he said. "Without it, we're not on the same page as providers and publishers, and it's near impossible to navigate all that's out there."

Last month AOL announced partnerships with MSNBC, NPR, Reuters, AtomFilms, Big-Boys.com, CBSNews.com, CNN, Healthology, Inc., Hollywood.com, IFILM, Like Television, ManiaTV.com, Dow Jones' MarketWatch, The One Network, ROO Media, and TotalVid.