Video search engine and indie film festival collaborate

Blinkx, a video search engine featuring over 18 million hours of searchable video with more than 200 media partnerships already, announced a new one yesterday with the Raindance Film Festival.

Under the terms of an agreement announced yesterday, Blinkx will host, transcribe, and index top independent shorts, features and documentaries from the independent Raindance Film Festival.

Raindance is the UK's largest independent film festival, established in 1992, and responsible for having created the British Independent Film Awards.

Rather than rely on tags to define material, Blinkx uses speech recognition and video analysis to find and qualify online videos. Its technology was conceived at Cambridge University over a 12-year period, during which Blinkx racked up no fewer than 111 patents for the process.

The Raindance videos featured Blinkx will be supported by its AdHoc advertising platform. So in addition to giving the film's director and cast increased exposure, any time the video is embedded on MySpace, GoogleVideo, YouTube, Revver, Metacafe, Veoh, DailyMotion, Break, FunnyOrDie, Vimeo, JibJab, iFilm, and CollegeHumor, the video will have contextually relevant ads placed near or on it. Whenever the ad is clicked on, Blinkx will share 50% of that revenue with Raindance.

This is the same revenue sharing deal that takes place with individuals who upload videos to the site.