Balakam Makes Searching for Live Video and Audio Easy

[Note: This sponsored interview was recorded at Streaming Media West 2012.] 

Creating live online events is a hot topic for broadcasters and other companies right now, but how to people find those events? What's needed is a simple search engine that focuses on live streams. What's needed is Balakam.

During a red carpet interview at the recent Streaming Media West show in Los Angeles, Balakam's CMO Daria Golyanina explained what makes her company's search tools unique and useful.

"Balakam actually uses almost the same search algorithm as traditional search engines do," said Golyanina. "But it has a very important benefit, a very important so to say thing that differentiates it from any other solution on the market: It can easily sort live media from recorded ones. It is really very critical when, for example, you're in the middle of your favorite baseball team game and you want to find it here and now and so the time becomes critical and you do not want to browse through a lot of irrelevant information on the Web so looking for live stream but bumping into a lot of text, graphic, and a lot of irrelevant information."

It sounds great when searching for local content, but can Balakam search for foreign streams, too? Can it bring a world of live events to the browser? Yes, it can.

"Another important benefit is its boundless searching area—our search engine browses the whole web so the searching area is global," Golyanina added. "We can find stream from any part of the world, from any part of the World Wide Web. So I think it's really unique for the streaming media world and that is why we can say that Balakam is a unique solution on the market."

To learn more about Balakam and what it delivers, watch the full interview below.

Eric: I'm Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen the Editor of Streaming Media magazine and I'm here at Streaming Media West 2012 where one of the hot topics has been video search and discovery. There's all this great content out there. How do we help people find it? One company that's doing something very interesting with that is a company called Balakam and I'll be speaking with both the CEO and CMO of Balakam to find out a little bit more about the company. First I'll be speaking with Daria Golyanina the CMO Daria, what is Balakam?

Daria: Actually Balakam is a web service designed to locate live streaming media on the web so what our search engine is doing is actually finding all sources of live broadcasting stations on the web. Say for example online TV, online radio stations, web cameras, broadcasting can here and now located on the web can be found using our search engines if you just type in the request. For example if you'd like to find some radio station from Brazil or some TV channel from Russia or some maybe live Web camera broadcasting used from any part of the world, you can easily do it using Balakam.

Eric: And how does Balakam differ from other search engines?

Daria: Balakam actually uses almost the same search algorithm as traditional search engines do. But it has a very important benefit, a very important so to say thing that differentiates it from any other solution on the market. It can easily sort live media from recorded ones. It is really very critical when for example you're in the middle of your favorite baseball team game and you want to find it here and now and so the time becomes critical and you do not want to browse through a lot of irrelevant information on the Web looking for live streams but bumping into a lot of text, graphic, and a lot of irrelevant information. And here where Balakam comes into being very helpful for this purpose. And another important benefit is its boundless searching area—our search engine browses the whole Web so the searching area is global so we can find stream from any part of the world, from any part of the World Wide Web. So I think it is really unique for the streaming media world and that is why we can say that Balakam is a unique solution on the market.

Eric: And I'm speaking now with Alexey Fomichev who is the CEO of Balakam. We talked a little bit with Daria about what Balakam does mostly focusing on searching for video of live events or live-event video. What other functions can Balakam perform?

Alexey: Actually, as we scan the Web continuously, we build a full picture of this world. So we know what is happening right now and what was on top yesterday. So it can make a difference and build trends to provide our users with a more convenient way to achieve the top topics or to check what is the difference between the streaming world months ago and today. And we've got all of the analytics data. The topic is hot—every month Google receives half-a-billion requests for live media, radios, webcams, and TV.

Eric: So in addition to that, what other development plans does Balakam have for the future? What should we look for in the coming months and years?

Alexey: In a month we'll come up with a new interface which we believe is going to be really useful for Internet users, but the ultimate goal is to create an application for Smart TV, which is going to be a sort of like a TV tuner, but for the Internet. So that's it.

Eric: Well great, exciting stuff and you can read more about it on StreamingMedia.com. Thanks Alexey and thank you Daria from Balakam.

Alexey: Thank you.

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