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By buying Singingfish, AOL becomes the leader in cutting-edge audio and video searches. It might next introduce a service that enables paid downloading of video files, such as movies or music videos. "This could be the prelude to AOL offering a multimedia download service," Sherman says.
From USA Today [usatoday.com].
I assume that this is not a done deal, but must be pretty well done though if they are announcing it. Interesting.
I like Singingfish. Cool site.
I wonder if anyone with music related sites has had any luck with their new Paid Inclusion advertising.
AOL buys multimedia SingingFish search engine.
Okay. I see the logic there. Multimedia searches will be a big thing in a year or so. But why AOL? Their troubles are legion, I think the one of the few deals giving them a boost these days is their Adsense partnership with Google.
If you were AOL, if Adsense was an important vein of lifeblood, would you think of "cheating on Google"?
Or am I being too paranoid?
Okay. For sure speculation (and a good thing I'm not supposed to be a disinterested reporter here) I go back to my observation that AOL proxies turn up as visitors to my hobby site whenever there's a deep Googlebot crawl.
Perhaps it's not only T-Online who is thinking about buying AOL. Perhaps AOL is trying to make itself look more attractive.
The rumours that AOL is up for sale keep resurfacing, latest has Deutsche Telekom as the buyer.
I'm rather surprised that AOL could see [i]the fish[/i] for it's long term value.
Multimedia searches will be a big thing in a year or so.
Doubtful. It hasn't been in high demand for years and I doubt it ever will be. People don't go looking for audio and video content they can find in text form more easily. AOL is really going in the wrong direction with this emphasis on multimedia in order to attract and retain users, particularly broadband users. They should be focusing on their core competencies which are what they've been doing forever -- ISP, chat, email, community, etc.
<off-topic>Be sure to read down to the bottom of the article and Sullivan's discussion about the "Invisible Tabs Metaphor" and Jeeves inteligent implemenation. The AJ/Teoma technology is overlooked by webmasters and users. (And seemingly the company since they shy away from telling people about it.)</off-topic>
Time Warner seen getting music offer [cbs.marketwatch.com]
We're merged now, a single thread, drama over.
I'm still curious to what AOL saw in the SingingFish though?
Mind you. When AOL and Time Warner joined together in the first place the plan was for an Internet media empire, where Time Warner would provide rich media movies and music through AOL's pipelines. That didn't really happen, but adding a multi media search engine to the portfolio is a step in the right direction.
What about the copyright concerns of audio music files? How different it is from kazaa et al?
Copyright issues for multimedia searches are more akin to the copyright issues for Google than for kazaa. The search engines help users find the site and generally only display a small piece of a given work.
Multimedia does poses challenges. For example, SingingFish relies completely its spider. I know several artist with the same problem. They want to publish their music online, but the hungry little spiders download the files so much that the spiders alone max the site's bandwidth.
Personally, I think the best way to handle such searches would be for an industry standard way to describe media files with text. That would save the massive amounts of bandwidth consumed by multimedia spiders.
The text results show a snippet from the page. There's just enough to help you decide whether you want to click on the link but not enough to exceed the "fair use" of a quote.
Multimedia results which show a picture, even a squished down and shrunk picture, are showing the whole picture. Showing the whole picture can't be the same as quoting a small sample.
Here's something to think about? What if a popular search engine showed these image summaries by hotlinking the images? Ouch. If you had an image which turned up often for popular searches then your bandwidth could go boom.
Personally, I think the best way to handle such searches would be for an industry standard way to describe media files with text. That would save the massive amounts of bandwidth consumed by multimedia spiders.
This was tried with meta description and keyword tags. We all know what happened there. To accurately display results in this fashion, you'd need a bunch of support personnel to uphold the standard. Then these people would have to download the files anyway to determine relevance, thus eating up bandwidth.
Perhaps some sort of multimedia standard for limited spidering....
When AOL and Time Warner joined together in the first place the plan was for an Internet media empire, where Time Warner would provide rich media movies and music through AOL's pipelines. That didn't really happen, but adding a multi media search engine to the portfolio is a step in the right direction.
A step in the right direction towards what?
Maybe someday when TV and the internet form a closer relationship, mm searches will be in demand ... but can't see that happening in the near future.
A step in the right direction towards what?
Towards having integrating large amounts of multimedia into the AOL channel.
Which leads to another point which is that what would be way more powerful and useful is text indices of multimedia content such that I could do a search for something that someone said and read the transcript instead of having to sit through the audio or video to find what I want to find. That's super labor-intensive, too, but as speech recognition gets better, it might become a reality.
I do think there are some great applications for audio and video on the web and that it's very powerful (or I wouldn't be wasting my time with my own projects). But being able to find this or that audio or video and being able to play it is not that valuable right now.
When AOL and Time Warner joined together in the first place the plan was for an Internet media empire, ...adding a multi media search engine to the portfolio is a step in the right direction.
This has nothing to do with creating a multimedia empire. TimeWarner discontinued that strategy months ago.
As MSGraph pointed out above, TimeWarner is desperately trying to sell their music division [nytimes.com] in order to cut $24 Billon in debt. So it's not creating a media empire. If anything, AOL is making a good move to keep it's constituents by hopping on the music bandwagon.
AOL controls a major share of the Hispanic market by focusing on delivering relevant content to them (soccer, latin american news, etc). AOL is pursuing the same strategy here, regarding the music. It's what AOL does best.
More interesting is that AOL is building out something in search themselves while promoting the bejesus out of Google in their TV ads. What exactly is their strategy here? My bet is they don't have one. Just one more misstep by a co. that could have been a major player search if they'd realized what they had. Oh AOL, what might have been!
