• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, August 17, 2007

Stepping out into the cutthroat world of video search, the AOL-owned Truveo has launched as a stand-alone branded service at www.truveo.com.

Video search is a highly saturated market with various sites--Google, blinkx, and Pixsy among them--now jockeying for users' devotion. Still, no service has yet to establish itself as the Web's de facto video search leader to the degree that Google has laid claim to text search.

To separate itself from the pack, the new Truveo is selling its ability to effectively retrieve much of the professionally produced content now being stricken from video sites like YouTube--by going directly to the content producers' own Web sites.

"There has been an explosion in the amount of professionally produced video that's available on the Web," said Timothy Tuttle, CEO and co-founder of Truveo and senior vice president of AOL Video. "While today's popular video sharing sites offer a wide variety of user-generated video, they rarely give users the opportunity to find professional, mainstream video. The new Truveo.com solves this problem, so whether it's a dog riding a skateboard or the latest episode of 'The Daily Show,' Truveo.com is the one-stop site for finding videos from across the Web."

Despite the popularity of consumer-generated video, the majority of adult U.S. Web surfers--62%--say they prefer professionally produced video over amateur fare, according to a recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

As a stand-alone brand, Truveo is launching with a few additional tricks up its sleeve. Truveo's search results are organized by category and by source so that users can choose videos they want from the large number of videos that may match their query. In addition, users can browse video by particular categories--such as news, sports, music and movies--and find video available both for free and for sale.

However, Truveo fails to clear the hurdle presented by defensive content owners who insist that the videos they own be streamed on their sites alone.

"In about 50% of the cases, by my estimation, you have to leave Truveo to [go to] third-party sites to watch the video you're looking for," commented analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Intelligence. "That means that with all the problems YouTube is having with copyright issues, it still offers the best unified viewing experience for users."

Founded in 2004 as a search engine to power other Web sites, Truveo was purchased by AOL in 2006. Since then, the brand has experienced an equal measure of successes and failures.

In late June, Truveo lost a prized partner in digital entertainment services company RealNetworks, which decided to shift its video search duties to blinkx.

Truveo's search technology stills powers AOL Video, MSN, CNet's Search.com, Qwest, CBS's CSTV, and Netvibes, among other sites.

To appease content owners' ongoing concerns over copyright infringement, the new Truveo makes a point of directing users to content owners' original Web sites.