VideoCrawler: AT&T Launches its Own Video Search Engine
It is not quite clear to us how a video search engine fits into AT&T's portfolio, but the telecom giant just launched VideoCrawler, a video search engine it developed in cooperation with Divvio, a Menlo Park-based startup. VideoCrawler is somewhat similar to Truveo, Blinx, or Meefedia, which we reviewed last week. In contrast to these services, VideoCrawler provides its users with more customization options, such as the ability to rearrange the interface, as well as the option to restrict searches to TV shows, podcasts, or slideshows.
VideoCrawler also allows you to create your own video collections and gives you the ability to embed any video on your own sites with the help of ClearSpring's Launchpad widget.
Among the sites indexed by VideoCrawler are the usual suspects like Hulu, blip.tv, MySpace Video, Google Video, and YouTube, though VideoCrawler also indexes presentations on SlideShare. We also noticed a large number of videos from newspaper and personal web sites. At the same time, however, our searches did not return any videos from sites like Revver, Vimeo, or Veoh.
More Than Just Video
One interesting feature of VideoCrawler is that it also allows you to restrict your searches to podcasts, Internet radio, TV shows, slideshows, and ringtones. This takes Videocrawler a step beyond most of its competitors and turns it into a more fully featured media search engine as opposed to just a video search engine, though, given its name, video search and aggregation seems to be the primary mission of VideoCrawler.
Overall, searching on Videocrawler worked quite well and it generally returned relevant results for our test searches.
Why AT&T is getting into this business is still not quite clear to us, but VideoCrawler is a worthwhile alternative to other video search engines, and will become even more so once it starts crawling a few more video sharing sites like Vimeo or Viddler.
Share
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
Interesting. My guess is that this is something that AT&T plans to use for their connected TV or Mobile initiatives.
Mefeedia actually offered Podcasts, TV, Music, and other "vertical" searches previously - but we found that it confused the interface and 99% of people just wanted a simple search interface. We plan to bring it back in a more "advanced" UI.
maybe they're testing voice recognition technologies the same way Google is doing with Youtube. So that when you make your next phone call they're system are trained to understand your conversation. For example they can recognize valuable keywords to be used for commercial purposes or for "security" reasons.
Frederic,
AT&T has been moving into broadcast for more than to years. It was there plans that first lead me to write about broadcast-Internet convergence in August 2006.
Its U-Verse concept provides all-digital television on your TV and home computer at the same time. In San Antonio they already offered 150+ channels to choose from, including local stations ... and that was in 2006!
It just goes to prove that not everything on the Internet is happening on the Internet.
Best,
Rich