AOL Gears Up With Video Search, Corporate AIM
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Written By Reprise Media | February 21, 2006 | Share This
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AOL is rolling out some big changes in the next few months. Search Engine Guide said yesterday that AOL is giving their video search a major overhaul starting this week, and News.com reports that AOL will team up with WebEx for two business-oriented instant message platforms to debut sometime this quarter. The moves coincide with AOL’s intent to abandon its old subscriber model (and hopefully all that disc-shaped junk mail) in favor of an advertiser-based plan.
AOL has been acquiring video search firms, such as Singingfish (in 2003) and Truveo (last month); this week’s video search page update will streamline the interface and incorporate Truveo’s unique “visual crawling” technology, which should boost the number of videos indexed by AOL by about 1.8 million. Additionally, some DVD-quality ‘Hi-Q’ video clips will become part of AOL’s repertoire, and next month AOL adds 14,000 “classic” TV shows provided by Warner Bros.’ In2Tv service - although it’s not clear if those will be in Hi-Q. Ad-supported episodes of such series as “Welcome Back Kotter” and the original “Battlestar Galactica” - classic, huh guys? - will be made available for free.
But it’s not all play for AOL. We already know that AOL’s business-to-consumer conversion ratio is top notch, and AOL’s Instant Messenger is the market leader, so AOL is combining those strengths and giving paid IM for businesses another shot. They’re calling the product AIM Pro, and will feature one version for larger businesses and one for smaller businesses and “the self-employed” - although one wonders why plain old IM won’t do for the latter. AOL touts the product’s enchanced security and voice-chat capabilities (a feature already used by Google’s and Yahoo’s messengers).
But will AIM Pro be good enough to pay for, given the prevalence (and popularity) of free, widely available IM software? AOL might be banking on businesses that have more money than sense, and Techdirt seems to agree: “It’s true that these products do tend to offer a few different features - but there isn’t much indication how much of that is worth paying for, which is the business model being used…They just seem to think that if they say it’s for businesses, then those businesses will come running.”
Topics: Search: Video |
Who runs this blog and why does it have no comments/traffic? Just wanted to know, it looks good.
Glad you like the content, Aaron. We’re the house blog for Reprise Media, an SEM firm, and many of the folks here make contributions to Searchviews. We’ve met and talked to a lot of our readers, and we leave it up to them to get discussions going when they find it useful.
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