FUTURISTIC GROOVES

Web video. Some believe it’s all about low quality, edgy clips which you can graze on at your laptop - others see the internet as simply a way of delivering quality content in high definition to your plasma screen. Or perhaps you want to be able to click onscreen and get a wealth of information from the web about what you’re watching? That’s what Blinkx, a company launching a new online video service, is betting can make it stand out from an increasingly desperate crowd.

Its BBTV application promises to take a ragbag of content, from news clips to documentaries to independent films, and present it to you online with Blinkx’s added ingredient - clickability. The idea is that you are watching a news item about monks in Tibet, you click and get the entire commentary on screen, use that to navigate to the section which interests you, and then click again to draw down all that rich information that the web can provide.

While watching blinkx BBTV, viewers can access transcripts of a program’s audio track and background information on everything from actors and personalities to reviews and locations shown within the video (MediaPost, 2008)

But isn’t it too late for another video wannabe to enter this market? As far as I can see, the audience has decided that it wants either YouTube or mainstream television - and the likes of Blinkx may fall through the gap in the middle.