AOL is serious about its recently acquired audio and video search engine SingingFish. Timer Warner’s Internet baby has been very busy on the wheel-and-deal circuit, signing up with some big name A/V feeders.
Last month, AOL announced a deal with Reuters to provide news video content for SingingFish, adding a huge amount of video submitted from all over the world. This month, AOL signed up 10 new partners. Atom-Films, CBSNews.com, Hollywood.com, Like Television, ManiaTV.com, MarketWatch, and the O Network are among the new playmates, according to this Cnet article.
AOL’s association with Time Warner gives it a distinct automatic advantage in the video world. CNN is already a part of the AOL mix of content providers, and with the decades of film content provided by Warner Brothers, AOL will surely have a leg up in this sector of the search world, even if other multimedia search engines have agreements with some of the same content providers.
SingingFish was acquired by AOL in 2003 and is one of the oldest multimedia search engines on the net.
The onslaught of multimedia content search providers continues to light up the search world with steep competition. Yahoo and Google are among other major players vying for kingship.
Also with the launch of the BitTorrent search engine , it should be an interesting battle to see who becomes king of the digital hill.
SingingFish handles over 200 million video and audio searches every month and has grown in popularity by 100% over the past year. AOL is one of the largest streamers on the Net with an on-demand archive of over 10,000 downloadable audio/video offerings.
Azhar Rafee, Executive Vice President, Reuters Consumer Service, said, “with broadband expected to be in more homes than cable and satellite within five years, the use of video over IP will continue to rocket. The challenge for news programmers is to make it easier for people to get straight to the video they want to see. Search has a key role to play here as it has become one of the most common ways that people access online content.”
