Internet TV | Main / Blinkx

by Fiona

Blinkx.com is a video search engine where users can also create TV channels that "automatically splice relevant content together", according to the site. They can also download videos to their mobile technology.

It has a unique interface on it's homepage that I've never seen before. Basically it's a 5x5 grid of seemingly randomly selected videos that are all looped clips, all playing at the same time. As you roll over a clip, it grows larger and gives you more information about what the clip is and what date it's from. It seems like almost all of the videos are from today which in some ways is an interesting way to present the videos of the day for the user to pick through. But at the same time, a lot of the videos are news reports, and they show a newscaster at a desk talking (with no sound). So in that sense, it's a pretty ineffective way to browse videos since you can't tell quickly and easily what the newscaster is talking about.

When you click on a video clip, the site takes you directly to the website hosting the video, sometimes that is blinkx itself. But when it IS a blinkx video, it has a blurb at the bottom describing the video. Yet when you click on the blurb to get more information, it just takes you to another window with the exact same video and blurb. Because all these videos open in other windows you wind up with a hundred windows open, some of them playing the same videos as other windows. It's overwhelming and seems to go against one of the purposes of the site, which I'm assuming is to provide a clean, easy way to view news.

One good thing about this site is that when you open a video from blinkx, it has a sidebar with links to related videos, so it's easy to find more video information (even if it's hard to get more written information).

It seems to be targeting people who like to get their news from a variety of sources but might not have the patience to surf through news sites. Because of its automated speech recognition and 'visual analysis' techniques for finding videos, I would assume that the videos covers the wide spectrum of news agencies and allows for a more unbiased view, but that's just my assumption.