Singingfish Announces Relationship with InfoSpace

Singingfish.com today announced the company has entered into a co-branding relationship with InfoSpace (www.infospace.com ). Singingfish's streaming search capabilities will be added to the InfoSpace's Go2Net.com, Dogpile, and MetaCrawler. In addition, InfoSpace will be integrating the Singingfish search capabilities into its broadband platform and using the search capabilities as a selling point to high-speed Internet access providers worldwide.

Singingfish just formally launched its multimedia search service this week at Streaming Media West. It states that it has already indexed more than six million streams. Singingfish sends out "spiders" to systematically crawl the web, and a rule-based classification system to retrieve and index all streams. In addition, its software also systematically checks the links to determine that they are not dead links.

Singingfish also offers content producers the option to join its Content Producer Program (CPP), which allows content producers to provide XML data to Singingfish. CPP members are guaranteed that their content is indexed in the most up-to-date manner.

The presence of metadata attached to each stream is imperative for a complete and accurate search with Singingfish's software. Ken Berkun, founder and VP of Marketing at Singingfish, states that while about 90 percent of all streams have a title, only 66 percent provide the author and copyright information.

Singingfish is actively working to help define the MPEG-7 standard. Once defined, MPEG-7 would greatly improve the functionality of Singingfish's software because all streams would have complete metadata. MPEG-7 seeks to define a set of description schemes and descriptors, a language based on an XML schema to specify description schemes, and a scheme for coding the description.

Thompson Multimedia completed its acquisition of Singingfish on December 1. Berkun believes that it is only a matter of time before this technology will be used on set-top boxes to allow consumers to search for almost any entertainment in a more natural setting -- on the couch. Thompson Multimedia is a large manufacturer of consumer electronic devices under the RCA and Thompson devices, including set-top boxes.