Online video site Blinkx is branching out into music with the launch of Blinkx Music Beta, a search engine for online music videos. The front page is simple enough. You're greeted with a search box, a list of top artists, and the ability to click a letter to see results starting with A through Z. You can search for artists, albums, or songs.

Unfortunately, the search index is pretty sparse. There are a number of songs, artists, and albums that return no results. And the search engine's not that intelligent. While a search for Coldplay returns a fair number of results, searching for Cold Play or Caldplay results in a "no results matching your query" message. So you'd better not include a typo or not know the proper phrasing of your favorite band name. Heck, on a whim, I tried searching for Hootie and the Blowfish and got zero results, which normally wouldn't upset me in the least. But Hootie & The Blowfish actually did return results.

Blinkx doesn't host the videos on its own site. Instead, when you click on a song you'll be taken to the page where the video rests, whether it be on YouTube, Last.fm, or another site. A Blinkx toolbar hangs out at the top of the screen to take you back to where you started or let you begin another search.

A fairly large number of videos I did find were cellphone recordings shot at concerts rather than professional music videos.

That's the bad news. Here's the good news: the Blinkbox online video service keeps getting better. I got an email today letting me know that Blinkbox had added a number of BBC TV shows which are now available to watch for free including episodes from the first two seasons of the original (William Hartnell) Doctor Who as well as episodes of The Young Ones, Hustle, and The League of Gentlemen. Update: It's just been pointed out to me that Blinkbox (which I mistakenly referred to as Blinkxbox at first) is not actually related to Blinkx. I'm still excited about the BBC content though.

[via VentureBeat]

Because the world didn't already have enough internet TV applications bringing you B-list movies and video podcasts, online video site Blinkx has entered the fray. Blinkx Broadband TV has all the usual bells and whistles including the ability to stream high quality video from the internet, watch in fullscreen, and browse through a list of "channels" with independent films, comedy clips, movie trailers, and the like. In other words, good luck finding any content you've actually heard of.

The one thing that sets Blinkx BBTV apart from the competition is that it incorporates Blinkx's speech recognition technology. While this feature isn't available in every video, when you click on the little dialog button in the toolbar in certain videos, you'll get a list of lines spoken in the film. Click on a line of dialog and you'll automatically jump to that point.

The application also features IMDB integration. What that means is you can pull up the information window on selected videos, and click on actors, directors, genres, and other information to bring up their IMDB pages in an in-application browser window.

Is Blinkx BBTV a Joost killer? Honestly, if anyone is a Joost killer these days, it's Joost. The company started out with a lot of buzz, but hasn't managed to sign the content partnerships necessary to keep viewers coming back. While Blinkx BBTV and many similar services present a nice tool for watching internet video, it's still not clear if there's a huge market for internet video that isn't watched in a browser or downloaded to a portable device.

The world of video advertising has only just begun. Google announced AdSense units using YouTube videos, and now Blinkx will be rewarding users for sharing video online.

Google offers AdSense customers a chance to provide exclusive content by placing ads over the top of online videos. But these flash ads can be distracting if you're watching a video. Blinkx takes a different approach by putting ads at the top of the video window so that there's never an ad covering the video display.

Blinkx is a video search engine with over 14 million hours of video online. Their technology uses both speech recognition and video analysis software to accurately find videos online from all major sources and now they are integrating this into targeted ad placement.

The Blinkx text ads will get placed together with embedded videos from such popular video sharing sites as YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, Veoh, CollegeHumor and Daily Motion. This will work with any video, be it copyrighted or not. It works by simply dropping the embed code from a video site into a form that will spit out the new Blinkx embed code complete with additional ad codes. This will then allow users to place the videos on social networks, websites and blogs to earn revenue per click. Users must have an account on Blinkx Adhoc as well as a PayPal account which they will get paid through when the ads are clicked on.

Blinkx pays you for embedding videos from YouTube, Daily Motion and other sites on your website. It doesn't matter if you created the original video or not. And it doesn't look like there's anything to prevent you from making money on copyrighted content like clips from movies and TV shows.

We assume that copyright holders might get a little uptight about that. But since Blinkx inserts an ad above the video window and not inside of it, you could argue that this is kind of the same as adding a Google AdSense unit to a webpage above content.

It's funny watching companies come out of the woodwork to take on internet TV platform Joost. It's not even clear if there's a market for full-screen video players yet, but nobody wants to let Joost become the next YouTube without getting in on the action.

Blinkx is the latest online video site to announce a full-screen video player, no web browser required. BetaNews gota sneak peak at Blinkx's upcoming BBTV the other night.

Blinkx is best known right now for its video search engine. BBTV will utilize the same video indexing features as the web service, allowing you to search for specific text in a speech track. This will also help Blinkx to integrate a contextual advertisements.

BBTV will deliver video using a peer-to-peer system, much like Joost.