blinkx SmartFeed Enables Users to Receive Customized Rich Media RSS Feeds
The SmartFeed service is a dramatic improvement to traditional text-based alerts, enabling blinkx users to receive continual automatic rich media updates from a wide variety of video and audio sources. Internet users can now visit blinkx, enter a customized search, specify from which of over 30 channels they wish to receive content, and click the “Create SmartFeed” button to begin receiving relevant rich multimedia content, delivered directly to their desktops. The audio and video segments are then aggregated from the selected sources, and delivered to their RSS readers as links, just like the basic, text-based services that exist today.
blinkx is the only search engine optimized for rich media, using voice recognition software to transcribe the content of audio and video segments, whether it is commercial broadcast material, from outlets such as CNN or Fox News, or user-generated material, such as podcasts and videoblogs. While traditional RSS feeds retrieve only text-based content, blinkx’s spider crawls the Web in search of rich media, automatically identifying and processing hundreds of hours of content on a daily basis, to make it readily available to users.
“The Internet has evolved into a vast media network, with more and more multimedia content becoming available every day,” said Suranga Chandratillake, founder of blinkx. “Much of the most current and compelling content on the Internet is in multimedia format – take breaking news, for example. blinkx’s unique automatic transcription technology and SmartFeed service help users navigate the increasing and diverse range of rich media that’s available to them.”
SmartFeeds give users an unprecedented level of control, offering them the flexibility to determine both the topic and the sources of any given feed. For the very first time, users are their own editors: they are no longer confined to receiving RSS feeds on predetermined topics as specified by individual content providers. SmartFeeds put information at the users’ fingertips, enabling them choose exactly what they watch and when they watch it. Building on the success of blinkx’s podcasting service, SmartFeed also supports RSS enclosure standards so that podcast content can be delivered directly to podcast receiver software allowing users to download, synch and go.