From the “we’re terrified of becoming a dumb pipe” and “that content ad revenue sure looks tasty” departments comes news that AT&T has launched a new beta video search portal dubbed Videocrawler. According to the AT&T press release, the portal was developed in concert with Divvio, and is designed to index hundreds of millions of video clips from thousands of sites. According to AT&T, the new beta portal will be banner ad supported, while indexing content from existing Internet video websites like Hulu, blip.tv, MySpace Video, Google Video, and YouTube. The portal also allows searching for audio content (podcasts, ringtones, radio).

That burning desire to connect customers to additional video content would of course be heavily monetized by AT&T’s exploration of low bandwidth caps. In AT&T’s ideal world, they not only control and meter the bandwidth, they deliver the content and cash in on the content advertising as well. Whether AT&T would be better focused on simply running a network (instead of developing video index portals or 3D web browsers) is yet to be seen.
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