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Oct. 31, 2007 at 5:24am Eastern by Greg Sterling
Truveo Launches Big International Expansion
After relaunching this August as a video search engine and consumer destination, AOL's Truveo is aggressively expanding on a global basis. By the end of the year, Truveo intends to be in 15 countries, including Russia and Turkey. Starting today it will be available outside the U.S. in France, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Spain, Taiwan, and the UK. The URLs all follow the pattern: http://uk.truveo.com. More URLs for the international sites can be found in the release.
YouTube has numerous international sites as well. However, Truveo indexes YouTube video in addition to video from major branded content sites and producers. Truveo CEO Tim Tuttle previously said to me that one important difference between Truveo and YouTube is that content is presented in an environment that is "favorable and friendly" to professional content producers.
This new international expansion, which, according to Tuttle, was challenging technically in certain respects, helps serve the already large non-U.S. audience for the site. It also comes just a couple of days after the private beta launch of NBC and News Corp.'s high-profile joint video venture, Hulu. AOL is one of several distribution partners for Hulu as well.
One of the interesting discussions that Tuttle and I had during the briefing for the international launch was how all this online video content and video search would eventually make its way onto TV. Tuttle agreed that it would.
With sites like Truveo, Hulu, and YouTube making a huge variety of branded and "tail" video content available, viewers might ultimately opt for those sites and sources rather than traditional broadcast TV or cable. Assuming the quality of the online video experience continues to improve, eventually a traditional cable TV subscription might be less and less necessary. One might only need the Internet and a screen in the living room.
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By Greg Sterling
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