AT&T Launches Video Search Website – Telco eyeballs delicious video content ad revenue

10 Nov 2008

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).

“We want to do everything possible to connect customers to the content they want, and today more than ever, what they want online is social media,” said Sean O’Leary, vice president, AT&T Business Development. “With thousands of popular video Web sites, it’s become more and more challenging to find, sort and manage all of the best clips that are out there. That’s exactly what we’re working to solve with VideoCrawler by allowing users to search from an index of the most popular media sources from across the Web.”

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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