New Search Engine Targets Internet Video, Audio New Search Engine Targets Internet Video, Audio Paul Jones
There are lots of fish in the dot-com ocean, but Singingfish.com sees a whale of an opportunity for its new search engine that hunts down video and audio clips of music, sports, movies and news on the Internet.
The Seattle-based start-up is set to debut its new streaming media search service, based on a database of 2.5 million media clips that it hopes will help satisfy a growing thirst for multimedia on the Web.
"Not in the too-distant future we will be in the situation of having TV with tens of thousands of stations, and the challenge is how users can find content that is important to them," Singingfish president Mike Behlke said.
Streaming usually requires a fast computer and Internet connection to work well, but is becoming more popular as technology improves.
Singingfish must avoid sharks like RealNetworks, a leader in software for playing streaming media that has been increasingly acting as an aggregator of multimedia content through its products and Web site.
Microsoft is also plying the waters, building support for its Windows Media Player software and directing users to its online media directory.
Behlke said many of those services were too narrow, while popular Web portals, such as Yahoo were powered by traditional search engines that had difficulty pinpointing specific video or audio files.
