I recently met up with Suranga Chandratillake, the CEO of Blinkx (a video search engine). He always has something new to talk about, and this time was no different.
His firm has recently launched BBTV, an online service that provides near TV quality. "We have blended our service with the advantages of the web," said Chandratillake. "For example, if you want to know more about an actor, you can click his or her name on a digital transcript and get a profile. This is possible because of our speech translation technology."
Basically, this can be an innovative way to monetize video, which so far has been a tough thing to do.
OK, but isn't high-quality video bandwidth heavy? That's true. However, BBTV uses the power of peer-to-peer networking, which is fairly cost-effective.
To get things rolling, BBTV has a variety of indie films from Dogwoof on the site. "We have more than 250 content partners at Blinkx," said Chandratillake, "and we plan to leverage them on BBTV. We want to be the place for hard-to-get quality content."
Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook
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