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OVGuide.com unveils video search engine powered with editors

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OVGuide.com, a guide to online video sites, including TV shows, movies, user-generated content, video games and music, unveiled a new search engine that makes finding online video more precise, fast and thorough than other alternatives on the web (at least to how the company dubs their service).

The search engine combines technology and human editorial to find the most relevant online video search results on the web. Let me stress though that even human beings are not as precise at times.

OVGuide.com prioritizes its results by category, editorial ranking, user statistics and the superiority of the site providing the video. This means that, whenever possible, OVGuide.com will direct visitors to the original source of the searched content rather than clips or irrelevant links, ensuring a quality viewing experience for the user and also benefiting content creators by sending traffic directly to their site.

OVGuide.com’s search engine is also capable of finding video content that others miss because it does not depend solely on XML feeds. It crawls any web site that contains or links to video. This allows visitors to find videos on niche sites, such as a cooking video created by a student, which typically do not have searchable XML feeds.

In addition, OVGuide.com’s search engine is faster than others’ as it doesn’t have to crawl every web site in existence. It relies on the more than 2,400 editorially-approved sites included in the OVGuide.com database, a much smaller amount of more relevant data. OVGuide.com delivers most search results in less than 0.01 seconds.

Originally posted on September 23, 2008 @ 10:53 am

Yahoo! and Rhapsody deliver song playback in search

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Yahoo! and Rhapsody are putting the play buttons right in the search box and making the web playable. Users who search for an artist with available content on Yahoo! will be able to click play right in the Yahoo! shortcut at the top of the search results and instantly stream full-length songs by that artist through the FoxyTunes Player, which is powered by Rhapsody.

“The launch of full-song playback in Yahoo! Search brings us closer to realizing Yahoo! Music’s vision of making the web playable and removing the barriers that prevent people from clicking play and hearing music,” said Michael Spiegelman, head of Yahoo! Music. “The powerful combination of Rhapsody and Yahoo!’s FoxyTunes Player will greatly enhance the discovery and consumption of music on the Web by giving online music fans what they want – an easy way to hear music.”

Originally posted on September 18, 2008 @ 2:25 pm

Truveo launches video search to mobile devices

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Video search engine Truveo has launched a public beta of Truveo Mobile Video Search, making it easy for users to find and view videos from across the web on popular mobile phones.

Consumers can access the Truveo Mobile Video Search beta site from RTSP-supported (Real Time Streaming Protocol) mobile phones by going to http://wap.aol.com/truveo. The new mobile video search site taps into Truveo’s index and makes it possible for consumers to search and browse through millions of videos on more than 300 websites whose content has been optimized for mobile devices.

Users can browse the most popular and top-ranked videos from the web or search for videos by keyword. Search results can be easily sorted by popularity, ranking, or date to quickly find compelling content.

Originally posted on September 10, 2008 @ 10:42 am

Dailymotion and Raindance launch Short Circuit Film Competition

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Dailymotion is partnering with Raindance.tv and the Raindance Film Festival to launch a new short film competition: Short Circuit.
 
Michael Winterbottom, the prolific award winning director of “Mighty Heart,” “In This World,” “Welcome to Sarajevo,” “Wonderland,” “Nine Songs” and “24 Hour Party People,” is to serve as Jury President of the competition. The winner will go to the Cannes Film Festival next year, and see their film showcased at this year’s Raindance Festival, as well as on Dailymotion and Raindance.tv.
 
The new competition, whose winner will be presented with his prize by Winterbottom at the Raindance Festival in London on October 8, is inviting aspiring filmmakers to present films running no more than 60 seconds each. The deadline for submissions is September 23, 2008.
 
The Raindance Film Festival runs for twelve days and nights, from October 1 to 12, showcasing a diverse selection of short films, documentaries and fiction features as well as galas, master classes, live music and networking parties. Through the competition, Dailymotion and Raindance.tv are seeking to stimulate and celebrate new work from filmmakers from the widest possible spectrum, including newcomers and outsiders and to encourage them to create and upload video content to their services.

Originally posted on September 5, 2008 @ 10:59 am

blinkx partners with Getty Images on search and advertising

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blinkx announced a partnership with Getty Images that would make its content more easily accessible at www.blinkx.com. Under the terms of the agreement, blinkx will leverage its AdHoc platform to place contextually relevant advertising against Getty Images’ multimedia, and will share resulting advertising revenue with Getty Images.

“We believe our assets deserve wide exposure, and we’re always looking for innovative ways to make our digital content easily accessible,” said Josh Rucci, senior director of multimedia sales, Getty Images. “We’re pleased to partner with blinkx, whose technology enables us to expand our reach further than ever before.”

blinkx has more than 350 partners and 26 million hours of indexed video and audio content, including favorite TV moments, news clips, short documentaries, music videos, video blogs annd more. blinkx uses advanced speech-recognition technology to deliver results that are more accurate and reliable than standard metadata-based keyword searches.

Originally posted on August 27, 2008 @ 8:52 am