AOL to Launch Video Portal

NEW YORK With its parent company perhaps just days away from eliminating its core subscription business, America Online is betting its future on the promising online video sector.On Aug. 4, the company will debut the AOL Video portal, which promises comprehensive content offerings, advanced search functionality and higher picture quality than its top competitors.The new portal will boast a robust lineup of 45 individual on-demand channels, including a host of top names from the cable universe. Besides the standard news and sports clips, AOL has inked licensing partnerships with A&E Network, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, TBS, TNT and Procter & Gamble Productions, among others. Several of these cable networks will supply video content from their own proprietary broadband channels, such as MTV Overdrive.According to AOL, thousands of hours of programming will be available to viewers at launch, the majority of which will be free and ad supported. Some longer-form content will also be available for fans to purchase and download to their PCs or other devices, such as full-length episodes of shows from A&E and MTV.Besides content from partners, the new portal will also showcase AOL's own programming, including the classic TV hub In2TV, Hollywood gossip blog TMZ.com, the popular AOL Music and the sports channel Lat34.com.To help guide potential viewers through this maze of video, AOL has built an elaborate, TV-like interactive programming guide for the site. But beyond organizing its own video content selections, AOL's new portal has been designed to aid users in navigating the plethora of video throughout the Web, including that of non-AOL partners such as Google, iFilm and Yahoo, as well as the universe of user-generated content on sites like YouTube.com. (Plus, the site allows users to post and share their own clips straight from camera phones, Webcams and camcorders.)At the center of this new endeavor will be AOL's video search product, which the company claims can actually locate more video clips than competing products using a proprietary "visual crawling" technology. AOL has invested heavily in video search to date, purchasing the search technology firms Singingfish in 2003 and Truveo late last year. Speaking with Mediaweek last month, Kevin Conroy, executive vp of AOL, laid out the vision for AOL Video and the importance of its search technology. "There is a certain segment of the market that is drawn to content that is packaged and programmed," he said. "Our guiding principles are to create and develop a destination that people think of as the best destination for video on the Web. Everything that matters you find there."

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AOL to Launch Video Portal

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