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Blinkx Gives Users Their RSS TV

Startup indexes search terms, then notifies users when matching content is available.

Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service

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San Francisco-based startup Blinkx has announced its multimedia search engine will be able to notify users whenever it indexes content that matches a term the users previously searched for.

The RSS alert system, called SmartFeed, is expected to go live on Blinkx's Web site on Tuesday. After users enter a search term on Blinkx TV, they will get the option of setting up an RSS alert for it. Blinkx TV delivers the alerts to the user's Really Simple Syndication aggregator service as text links to the multimedia content.

Users can opt to receive content alerts for any search term from all or some of Blinkx TV's more than 30 audio and video channels, which include BBC News, Fox News, CNN, Bloomberg Television, NBC, MSNBC News, ABC, and ESPN, said Suranga Chandratillake, Blinkx's co-founder.

Media Everywhere

Blinkx also plans to make available the application programming interface for SmartFeed so that developers can incorporate it into their own Web sites and software, he said. Those using the API for personal purposes will not have to pay anything, while commercial developers will have to request a license for it, he said. There will be a section of the Blinkx site devoted to SmartFeed developers, according to Chandratillake.

In addition to indexing multimedia content from commercial providers, Blinkx TV also serves up amateur audio and video collected from the Web at large, as well as podcasts.

Blinkx TV uses speech recognition and transcription capabilities to index not just audio and video files but the spoken parts of those files. This means that Blinkx TV is able to deliver the precise clip that contains the term the user is searching for, as opposed to just pointing the user at, say, an hour-long clip without indicating where in it the desired segment appears.