Blinkx Offers Free TV, Radio Searches

New service Blinkx offers to search radio and television programs for your search terms, and optionally deliver the results to you via RSS or SmartFolders.

San Francisco-based Blinkx debuted a free, novel service which uses speech recognition technology to scan and index radio and television programs available via the Internet, and deliver search results to users via the Web or via customized RSS files called SmartFeeds.

The Blinkx service, currently in a beta form, offers video from mainstream news sources such as CNN, Reuters, NBC, CNN, Forbes, E!, iFilm, The New York times, ITN, and C-SPAN, as well as public radio, podcasts, and Voice of America. Search results appear with a surprisingly useful text transcript, and are automatically cued to a point which matches the user’s search terms, so users don’t have to download half an hour of boring congressional testimony just to get to the part they wanted. The Blinkx service also offers a conceptual search, where users type natural language text as their search, and Blinkx returns results which are semantically (or "conceptually") similar. Windows users may also create Smart Folders, which work like ordinary folders but contain regularly updated results of specific queries.

For the time being, the free Blinkx service is operating off investor capital, but expects to generate revenue via ads and other means as the service solidifies and evolves.