Blinkx to host Future’s web magazines
BLINKX, the world’s biggest video search website, added mountain biking, heavy metal music and gaming to its burgeoning content portfolio yesterday as it penned a partnership with magazine group Future Publishing.
Future, which produces magazines such as Metal Hammer and Xbox World 360, will make all of its 100 or so digital magazines available on Blinkx on an advertising revenue share basis.
Blinkx will get the benefits of Future’s viewer base of more than 25m unique monthly users, and 160m page impressions, as it sells advertising around the video player.
Blinkx founder and chief executive Suranga Chandratillake said the partnership gave it access to Future’s “wide variety of high-quality special interest content”.
Future’s UK chief executive Mark Wood said video content was “a key strategic driver for our business moving forward”. Blinkx’s technology and search abilities would “allow fans everywhere to easily discover and watch relevant video content online”, he added.
The partnership with Future is the latest catalyst in a high-speed growth path for Blinkx, which was spun out of Cambridge-based intelligent software developer Autonomy in 2007.
It has added more than 720 content partnerships so far, with recent additions including Fashion TV and news aggregator Newslook. It says it has indexed more than 35m hours of video and audio content to date.
Blinkx raised £25m in a London IPO in 2007 and is now valued at about £400m, as it has proved a hit with consumers.
Its technology – protected by more than 100 patents – uses algorithms to detect patterns in content such as images and sounds.