Will Either News Corp. or Google Buy Blinkx?

SAI asks an interesting question: Blinkx might be in play, and News Corp. (NWS) and Google (GOOG) are suggested to be interested.

Interesting. (Disclosure: technically, all three companies are our distribution partners and News Corp. employed me briefly in 2005.) Anyway, here goes:

Should News Corp. Buy Blinkx?

Technically, by virtue of being a media company, News Corp. would probably not even know where to start with a technology company like Blinkx. Of course, like all new technology firms, Blinkx is choosing a free, ad-supported route, and in this vein, News Corp. would be able to deliver on that promise.

In fact, News Corp. has bought some technology, namely, Strategic Data Corp., to better optimize its own ad inventory. However, it did so out of necessity because it owns the world’s largest social networking site, MySpace, which commands more pageviews than any other site out there. It should be noted, of course, that MySpace is also #2 in online video after industry gorilla YouTube. I have long argued that MySpace would be better served positioning itself as an entertainment/media hub (news to Ash: it already does that) and bolstering its video offerings (again, it already does this).

But because not all video is created equally and currently video is largely indexed by metadata (which is not very efficient), it is not crazy for News Corp. to want to buy Blinkx to better manage all of that GREAT video content on MySpace TV. Pardon the shameless plug, but I just linked to our 9 - count ‘em - 9 channels on MySpace TV.

The point is: with MySpace and FIM doing $900M in revenues, Rupert Murdoch knows that giving MySpace’s 75M unique users better search tools to find its burgeoning video content can help it catch up to YouTube in terms of video streams and hit its own internal revenue targets.

What about Google?

Google does not really have a video search tool, let’s face it. Its YouTube property still searches largely by metadata. Google is surely, surely using some of YouTube’s screening systems (you know, the ones that scan for porn and block that) to see how it can internally address video search… but the concept of buying video search is not out of the question because Google is now largely interested in Buying over Building (Blogger, Picasa, Feedburner, YouTube, Doubleclick, Grand Central, etc.).

I am a media guy, I understand technology, but not enough to tell you if Blinkx is the technology Google or News Corp. should buy… After all, what if the tech flops (I’m not saying it will) and then News Corp. can’t go with better technology? Maybe there is a reason media companies like to license technology and not buy it.

Then again, at $200M, it’s throwing a coin in the air.