On a day that future generations will refer to as "Video Monday", the Washington Post has gotten wind of yet another video deal. San Francisco-based Blinkx.tv will announce a partnership with Microsoft to power the video search on their sites, including MSN and Live.com. Presumably MSN Soapbox, Microsoft's new YouTube clone, will also benefit from the technology. The deal makes Blinkx the "single biggest video search engine on the Web", with Blinkx already powering the search on AOL, Lycos, Times Online and more. They also index video clips from around the web and allow users to search them on Blinkx.com and partner sites.
The agreement is different to the usual search hook-ups, since the two companies aren't sharing ad revenue - instead, Microsoft is paying a license fee based on how often visitors use the search function. The Blinkx technology is pretty advanced, combining voice recognition with image and contextual analysis, according to the WaPo. Striking a deal with Microsoft in video is big news for the company, but MSN is now a lesser player in the video space, where Google Video, YouTube and MySpace Video dominate.