blinkx, which has been steadily expanding its portfolio beyond its core video search product, this week announced Advanced Media Platform or "AMP" (not to be confused with Adobe Media Player/AMP or Yahoo's Advertising Management Platform/AMP). I spoke with Suranga Chandratillake, blinkx's founder/CEO last week to learn more.

blinkx is addressing a problem that I hear about often - how can content providers which have increasingly large volumes of video on their sites make it more discoverable, helping drive usage and therefore ad revenues. Just this week on a panel at Digital Hollywood, Andy Forssell, Hulu's SVP, Content and Distribution, highlighted this problem, saying "we believe great content is significantly underwatched."

With AMP, blinkx has packaged up various offerings previously available web-wide into an enterprise product. These include its core video search/indexing technology, plus an SEO module and AdHoc, its contextual advertising platform for targeted monetization. blinkx is positioning AMP as a comprehensive approach that content providers can implement quickly on their sites. AMP is available in both licensing and ASP models. In the ASP model, AMP is available for a fee, or through ad revenue sharing. Suranga believes the ad sharing approach will likely end up being most popular.

blinkx announced 3 new AMP customers, Conde Nast's Portfolio.com, WallSt.net and Kiplinger.com. blinkx's AMP reminds me most of EveryZing, which I wrote about here. EveryZing's ezSearch and ezSEO take a similar approach to wringing value out of video assets. Pixsy is another company offering white label video search. Earlier this week it announced National Lampoon's network of sites as a new customer.

As content providers shift their focus from just getting their video online to actually monetizing and earning an ROI on it, discovery becomes critical. Therefore, I expect lots more activity in this space yet to come.