Search engine provider blinkx introduced its "my blinkx.tv" service on Monday, enabling users to create personalized video channels where they can maintain video blogs of their own content while aggregating video content from other sources.
Cable and telephone companies are gearing up to provide video over the Internet, and other search engines such as Yahoo have been providing fresh video content of their own.
"At blinkx, we believe that IPTV should combine the interactive, customizable experience of the Internet with the simple seamless way we watch TV," said Suranga Chandratillake, founder of San Francisco-based blinkx.
- ADVERTISEMENT Video channels on my blinkx.tv can be viewed as a continuous stream online, or users can download a video to their desktop or portable video player to watch it offline.
Blinkx will normalize the footage, convert it into Flash format, create an audio transcript to accompany it, and index the file.
The footage then becomes part of an online library that can be searched by topic.
The service currently does not employ digital rights management (DRM) technology, because it only allows users to download content that other users have agreed to share.
However, blinkx faces some competition in the Internet video area.
They include Veoh Networks, Popcast, the nonprofit Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF), Open Network Television, Kontiki's Open Media Network, and FireANT (see Jumpstarting the TV Web Race).
Instead, blinkx will be hosting all the content itself to build its own video archive.
"To do the my blinkx.tv functionality, where we splice the content together, we need to have the content on our servers," explained Mr. Chandratillake.
"We need to standardize the format to standard sizing and standard resolution, so we host it and service it from our own servers."