AOL continues to try to improve its position in online video, a multiyear effort that has involved acquisitions, in-house development and strategy changes but that hasn’t yielded the company the leadership position in this red-hot market.
Truveo is one of several video sites that AOL runs and that it is says complement each other. While Truveo focuses on video search, UnCut is a video-sharing site and AOL Video is a video portal.
Until now, AOL hadn’t pushed Truveo strongly as a destination site, but it hopes to change that with the new improvements. AOL was prompted to enhance Truveo’s site after seeing a strong growth in its traffic in the past year.
It’s not the first time AOL has gone down this road. It acquired the Singingfish multimedia search engine in 2003 and, initially, kept its Web site out of the spotlight.
Like Truveo’s, Singingfish’s technology was used primarily to power the search sites of various AOL and non-AOL Web properties. However, in December 2004, AOL announced a change of strategy for Singingfish, quite similar to Thursday’s Truveo announcement.
At the time, AOL trumpeted its decision to revamp Singingfish as a destination site, citing, as it now does for Truveo, an organic and strong increase in its traffic.
During 2005, AOL built up Singingfish, boosting its traffic, and sought to create tie-ins with units at Time Warner, AOL’s parent company, and beyond to index video content in broader, more efficient ways.
However, when AOL announced its Truveo acquisition in January 2006, the company found itself with two video search engines and pledged to integrate their technologies. Months later, Karen Howe, Singingfish’s general manager and its leader for the previous five years, left AOL.
In July 2006, AOL unveiled a preview of its new AOL Video portal. In September, the vendor introduced a developer program for video search and Tim Tuttle, Truveo’s co-founder and now AOL Video senior vice president, said the company was creating an integrated platform for its various video sites.
Now, the Singingfish Web address redirects people to AOL Video and the Singingfish technology has been integrated with Truveo, a spokesman for AOL said.
In the almost four years since AOL acquired Singingfish, a revolution has occurred in online video. A subpar and frustrating experience for many years, watching video online has in the past two years become a very popular activity for Internet users, thanks to improvements in technology. In May 2007, nearly 75% of U.S. Internet users watched an average of 158 minutes of online video per user, according to comScore Networks.
Unfortunately for AOL, it wasn’t able to position itself as the leader in this revolution. Instead, YouTube, a start-up founded in early 2005, seemingly came out of nowhere to become the world’s preferred video site, a position it maintains, now as part of Google, which acquired YouTube last year.
In Hitwise Pty. Ltd.’s ranking of video sites by U.S. visits, YouTube nabbed almost 62% of the traffic in July of this year, followed in a distant second place by MySpace’s video site with almost 18 percent. AOL Video ranked in ninth place attracting a little over 1% of all visits.
Looking at the market by actual video streams, YouTube and Google Video together nabbed 21.5% in the United States in May, while the Time Warner video sites, which include AOL’s, came in fifth place with 2.2%, according to comScore.
Video sites can be generally divided into three categories: video search engines, which are designed to let people enter keywords and find clips on the Web, such as Truveo, Google Video and Blinkx; video-sharing sites, which are for uploading clips and sharing them with others, like YouTube and UnCut; and video portals, such as AOL Video and Yahoo Video, which generally combine features from search and sharing sites with other capabilities. However, the boundaries between these categories are increasingly blurring.
Truveo’s new version has been designed as a one-stop shop for people looking both for amateur and professionally produced videos, AOL said Thursday. Truveo has indexed tens of millions of videos from thousands of sources. It lets users do keyword searches, browse its index by categories and save and share links to videos.
Truveo’s search technology is used in other AOL and non-AOL sites. Third-party organizations that use the Truveo technology include Microsoft, Qwest, Brightcove, Infospace and Excite.
