SAN FRANCISCO — A deal between two little-known California technology companies is the first step, some experts say, in what could be the next big thing on the Web: search engines that let you find movies and TV episodes -- and then buy or rent them.
The tie-up between Santa Monica-based Movielink and Blinkx, a start-up based here, is a key development in bringing together television and movies with the world of Internet search, some analysts said.
The two companies plan to announce today that Movielink, a downloading service owned by five major studios, will make its pictures available through the Blinkx search engine.
No money is changing hands in the deal, executives with the companies said. Movielink will get additional exposure, and Blinkx will get access to movies that other search engines lack.
Blinkx uses speech-recognition and other technologies to make a searchable index of trailers for the movie service's nearly 1,000 titles. The company hopes to expand the index to include dialogue from the movies themselves -- so that, one day, users who type "I'll be back" will find "The Terminator" and be able to download it for a $3.99 rental.
Silicon Valley and Hollywood still have many obstacles to overcome before legal downloading of films and TV shows becomes mainstream. There are concerns about piracy, technical challenges involved in transferring the video to the viewer's television and questions about how these ventures will make money.
But Movielink's willingness to work with Blinkx may open the door for such Web giants as Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., America Online Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN to help users scour the vast Web to find movies and television shows they can legally download for a fee, industry experts say.
"It is the next frontier," said Allen Weiner, an analyst with research firm Gartner Inc. of Stamford, Conn. "What we've been working with until now is one-dimensional content on the Web that is advertiser supported. The next level, which will really change the economics of the Web, is searching and indexing premium content that does not live on the Web."
Blinkx and its 25 employees are trying to outmaneuver the Internet giants, which all are trying to tackle the problem of how to index videos so Web surfers can find them more easily. That will become crucial as movie studios and TV networks start to distribute more of their productions on the Web.
