Gemstar-TV Guide Licenses Online-Search Technology
CastTV to Power TV Guide Online Video Guide
By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 6/21/2007 8:00:00 AM
Gemstar-TV Guide International signed a two-year licensing deal with CastTV to use the startup’s video-search technology for the TV Guide Online Video Guide.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
TV Guide’s Online Video Guide, launched in beta form in April, uses CastTV’s proprietary search technology to automatically index video content from the Web sites of broadcasters, cable programmers and Internet-video aggregators and rank it by relevance.
“Using CastTV’s indexing technology, we have been able to ensure that TV Guide is providing users of our Online Video Guide with a unique and relevant way to search for entertainment video on the Internet,” TV Guide Online general manager Paul Greenberg said in a prepared statement.
According to CastTV, its search technology can scan “the entire Web” for video content, including both professionally produced material and user-generated content.
CastTV expects to launch its own consumer-destination site for online-video search this summer. Based in San Francisco, the company received $3.1 million in funding from venture-capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson and individual investors including Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Netscape and co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used Web browser.
The company was formed in 2005 by the husband-and-wife team of Edwin Ong and Aleksandra Vikati. They sold their previous venture, data-access-software developer FileFish, to Oracle in 2003.
