Speculation is rising around a potential acquisition of Blinkx, a video search engine by either Google or News Corp (and possibly Yahoo!). Traffic to Blinkx has increased steadily over the past year – the market share of visits for the week ending May 10, 2008 is 10x higher than the same week in 2007. Much of this growth is being driven by new users, since 62% of the traffic to Blinkx during the same timeframe had not visited the website in the past 30 days.

San Francisco - Blinkx, a searchable index of Web video, announced on Wednesday the launch of blinkx BBTV, a downloadable application that delivers a library of independent films and other programming from existing partners. The service uses hybrid peer-to-peer streaming, similar to Joost, and offers full-screen video in addition to Blinkx's speech recognition-powered video search. The company said it will be adding dozens of additional channels in coming months, and will also offer to power BBTV players for partner media and entertainment sites.

San Francisco - Blinkx, the developer of a video search engine, on Thursday announced content partnerships with the BBC, CBS and The Weather Channel. With the agreements, the site will further expand its programming, which already includes 18 million hours of indexed video and audio content from more than 220 partners.

San Francisco - Blinkx, a searchable index of Web video, announced on Thursday that it has signed a deal with Utarget, to place video advertising around its video content for U.K. audiences. The deal includes Blinkx video from U.K. broadcaster ITN. Utarget claims a network of more than 125 sites and said it delivered 9.6 million video ads in August, from advertisers including Coca-Cola, Shell and Smirnoff.

San Francisco - Blinkx, a searchable index of more than 12 million hours of Web video, on Monday introduced AdHoc, which it is calling the first contextually-relevant video advertising platform.

San Francisco - Blinkx, a searchable index of Web video, saw its shares rise 40% in their initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange Tuesday, which garnered around $50 million and saw the company valued at nearly $355 million.

Cambridge, U.K. - Autonomy, a provider of enterprise and consumer search technology, announced on Wednesday that it will exercise an option to buy consumer video search provider Blinkx, merge its own consumer search division with the company, and file for an initial public offering on London's AIM exchange next month.

San Francisco - Blinkx, a searchable index of Web video, announced on Monday a partnership with JamBase, a provider of tour date information for over 30,000 bands and 50,000 venues worldwide. Under the agreement, Blinkx will transcribe and index JamBase's artist interview and concert videos, making it easier for users to find and watch them.

Los Angeles - Gemstar-TV Guide International plans next month to launch a test version of an online video search tool that will return results from 60 websites that feature both on-air and original online programming from TV networks and major media companies, the Associated Press reported. The company, which plans to sell ads on the site as well as license the technology, will compete in the video search space with Blinkx and AOL's video search tool. TV Guide told AP it doesn't plan to include user-generated content posted on sites like YouTube and Revver in its index.

San Francisco - Blinkx, a searchable index of Web video, announced on Tuesday an agreement to add thousands of hours of video content from Internet TV broadcaster Veoh Networks to its index. Veoh's content consists of user-generated videos, in addition to licensed clips from partners including TNT, Us Magazine and United Talent Agency.

Palm Desert, Calif. [DEMO 07] - Blinkx, a searchable index of Web video, announced on Tuesday the launch of a free widget tool that bloggers and websites can use to insert relevant video streams. Introduced at the DEMO 07 event in Palm Desert, Calif., the "blinkx it" widget lets users embed a video player to their sites and set keywords that then draw relevant video streams from San Francisco-based Blinkx's 7 million hours of indexed audio, video, viral and TV content. The tool will become publicly available online on Thursday.