ITV Consumer to Partner with blinkx Video Search Engine

July 21, 2006; 03:15 AM

ITV's Consumer Team has announced a deal with blinkx, the world's largest video search engine, to provide users with up-to-the-minute footage and exclusive behind-the-scenes clips from the second season of Love Island. Footage from the hit reality show will be fully searchable through www.blinkx.tv. This deal marks another ground-breaking step for ITV Consumer in delivering all the best content from its top shows online.

Love Island follows a group of celebrities, including supermodel Sophie Anderton, on the island of Fiji as they compete for viewers' votes to be named the Love Island ultimate couple. After each new episode, highlights and extra footage of Love Island will be available on www.blinkx.tv.

"ITV online is an entertainment destination with up to the minute information about shows and celebrities. We are very pleased to provide our blinkx users with online access to an abundance of popular clips and unique footage from the latest season of Love Island," said Suranga Chandratillake, founder and CTO of blinkx.

blinkx.tv (www.blinkx.tv) is the world's most comprehensive video search engine. Today, blinkx.tv has indexed more than 4,000,000 hours of audio; video, viral and TV content, and made it fully searchable and available on demand. blinkx's founders set out to solve a significant challenge -- as TV and Garage Video on the Web explodes, keyword-based search technologies only scratch the surface. blinkx's patented search technologies listen to -- and even see -- the Web, helping users enjoy a breadth and accuracy of search results not available elsewhere. In addition, blinkx powers the video search for many of the world's most frequented sites. blinkx is a privately-held company based in San Francisco and London.

ITV (www.itv.com) has established ITV Consumer (ITVC) to build businesses which create direct consumer relationships for ITV. Led by Jeff Henry, it is expanding ITV's family of channels to encompass mobile, broadband and other services. ITV.com has all the best entertainment and showbiz information from ITV, offering the user a world class online experience.