The focus on blinkx, the UK owned video search engine, perhaps began just over a week ago, when it quietly announced that it would double the size of its advertising team. The focus became intense during the past five trading days, as speculation mounted that the time is ripe for the company to be acquired, with a variety of names being mentioned, enough to almost double its share price
blinkx first came to our attention in mid-2005 when it was just building up traffic, and had no discernible business model. It has since added a number of advertising approaches to its business including one recently built around
contextual advertising within online video.
The company was last year merged with the video assets of search technology specialist Autonomy, which has always had options to buy it, and been taken public last May. At the time it had a value of around $250 million and we said that if this had been a US company, that value would have been far higher. But the stock price has, if anything drifted down since the flotation, not gone up.
blinkx uses speech recognition and then indexes the spoken words in a piece of video as one of a handful of ways to navigate video and originally was a breakaway from Autonomy, and used some of its patented technology under license. Today it has 220 partners and indexes for 18 million hours of indexed video and audio.
All the usual suspect have been named in connection with blinkx being acquired including Google, News Corp and even Yahoo! blinkx says that traffic on its site is 10 times higher than a year ago.