• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, July 19, 2005

Giving Netizens far and wide the ability to automatically index the growing selection of audio and video content online, search provider Blinkx today is expected to introduce "SmartFeed," a free RSS service that enables users to receive continual automatic rich media updates from any potential video and/or audio source.

"SmartFeeds gives users a TiVo-like level of control over their media online, which will only improve as the content available online improves," Suranga Chandratillake, founder of Blinkx, said.

Blinkx is launching this RSS service at a time when little is known about the RSS market, how it is used by the public, or how it will be monetized. One study by RSS ad network Pheedo, scheduled for release later this week, shows that click-through rates differ by more than 70 percent throughout the week, and feed retrieval has a 47 percent swing from the most active day--Tuesday, apparently--to the least active, Saturday. Pheedo also found that click-through rates fluctuate from 7 to 11 percent, depending on the hour of the day that users are consuming content, with peaks late at night and late in the afternoon.

Seventy percent of Pheedo-managed feeds are read by just five aggregators: Ask Jeeves' Bloglines, Firefox, Thunderbird, NewsGator, and Sharpreader.

Blinkx is not a feed aggregator, but allows users to enter a customized search at www.blinkx.tv, specify from which channels they wish to receive content, at which that content is aggregated from its sources, and delivered to a user's RSS reader in the form of a link.

Blinkx uses voice recognition software to transcribe the content of audio and video segments, so that users can search by words or phrases to find the exact broadcast material they're looking for.

Currently, Blinkx gives searchers access to videos from over 70,000 hours of online videos, with sources including Reuters, Fox News, ESPN, Forbes.com, The New York Times Company's NYTimes.com, and About.com, as well as BusinessWeek Online.