AOL does video search

AOL quietly launched a new video-on-demand search service on Thursday, opening the doors for millions of internet users to view music videos, news segments and other content from parent company Time Warner, whose mountain of media holdings gives AOL an advantage over rivals Google and Yahoo!.

The beta service, called AOL Video, offers free access to search and playback for more than 15,000 licensed and originally produced video assets from Time Warner, including television programmes and music videos, movie trailers from Warner Bros and news clips from CNN, MSNBC and others. AOL's Singingfish multimedia search engine, which the company acquired two years ago, will complement the new service by pointing visitors to audio and video from across the web.

AOL will announce the test service on Tuesday but it can be previewed by visiting AOL.com's new beta homepage, and clicking on the video search tab. On Tuesday, AOL is also expected to announce it is developing a video hub, which is a specialised page for watching the latest multimedia content. It is expected to launch this summer.

Gary Price of SearchEngineWatch.com wrote in a blog: "Today, AOL begins rolling out their new, improved, and free video search service (beta) and so far, pardon the pun, I like what I see."

Though still a test, AOL Video is the company's biggest, most comprehensive effort to court web surfers with a free pass to Time Warner entertainment and media video assets, which have been available only to AOL members. As the company has faced subscriber losses for dial-up and broadband service, it has retrenched with plans to migrate content and services to the web in order to boost traffic and sell lucrative video advertisements.

The plan is particularly important to AOL as it seeks to cash in on a resurgence in online advertising that's been largely driven by search-marketing giants Google and Yahoo!. Online video advertising is seen by market analysts as a big growth market.

Google and Yahoo! have both introduced video search engines in the last six months. Google started offering playback of video clips from CNET Networks, Greenpeace, Unicef and others for the first time last week with the use of a proprietary downloadable player. Google did not disclose how much material its database holds but the company is regularly soliciting new partners. Yahoo! doesn't provide a playback feature.

AOL is banking on free on-demand video to be its trump card. As Google and Yahoo! have engaged in a search-technology features war over the last year, AOL has slowly mixed more of its content into web search as a means to gain an edge in the marketplace.

Already, AOL's video search engine has access to 15,000 pieces of content - with an average playback length of three minutes - from the Associated Press, Dow Jones, Reuters and Universal. AOL also plays back the content in a proprietary video player, which supports technology already installed on PCs but visitors do not have to download an application.

AOL has an advantage in the search-video game with its advertising capabilities and breadth of content. The company has strong ties to Hollywood through its parent company's Warner Bros studios, among other properties, and can leverage that to outdo video assets from Google and Yahoo!. The company is also selling and running 15-second commercials that will run before a select group of Time Warner-owned video clips.

Google has yet to place commercials before or adjacent to video.

The technology for AOL Video includes speech-to-text processing that enables not only searches by title, description and artist but also searches for keywords within the body of the video. The technology combines internal software developed by AOL and its Singingfish.

Singingfish specialises in scouring the web for video and audio clips and then pointing visitors to sites where they can play back the media. In recent weeks, Singingfish announced a slew of content partnerships with companies such as Atom-Films, CBSNews.com, Hollywood.com, Like Television, ManiaTV.com, MarketWatch and The One Network.

Stefanie Olsen writes for CNET News.com