Joost may be the biggest and best known service for providing video on demand, but the amount of challengers to its top dog crown is seemingly growing weekly. The latest contender is BBTV, a new service from Blinkx due to launch in the autumn.

BBTV, short for Broadband TV, will be a downloadable P2P client which enables it’s users to search for TV shows and movies. The idea and software will be nothing without content and so distribution deals are currently being worked out.

Blinkx is quickly standing out as the online video search engine that is indexing videos from more video sites than anywhere else.

While YouTube is the video host with the most, its collection is a lot smaller than what you would find by searching for videos on Blinkx.

Blinkx has announced a new tool called Blinkx remote to help you find free and paid TV shows online.

Read about it on our sister site, Web TV Hub. Press release follows:

VideoJug, one of the major instructional ‘How-to’ video sites, has inked a deal with Blinkx to have its videos made available through the Blinkx video search engine.

Blinkx will now go ahead and index the entire library of VideoJug’s instructional videos so they can be found easily in the Blinkx search results.

This of course makes perfect sense. Blinkx can provide access to more content to its users, and Video Jug can gain more visitors, a win-win situation.

If you run a website that hosts video, or if you have a video podcast or upload online videos then you will always want as many people to watch your video as possible.

A large potential source of traffic can be from search engines, and more specifically the emerging video search engines. But if you don’t do things right you can lock yourself out of this traffic altogether.

Blinkx is a video clip search engine that uses speech-to-text transcription technology to index online video, including both user-generated and commercial content.

Blinks has created a very simple but yet very innovative widget for webmasters. The widget is called Blinkx It and it allows you to insert relevant video into your website automatically.

We know that internet video has really taken off but just take a look at the growth of some example video related sites. The growth of video sharing sites like YouTube and Metacafe are phenomenal.

Now we are also beginning to see the growth of video search engines that index video from a variety of sources. These video search engines are lagging behind the major video sharing sites, but will these search engines ever catch them up?

graph courtesy of alexa

YouTube.com

The leading website for sharing and watching online video clips. The company was recently sold for $1.77 billion to Google. It now ranks as the 4th busiest site on the internet and receives an estimated 20 million unique users per month, but it could be over 30 million by now. YouTube was officially launched in December 2005 and has seen huge growth since the middle of 2006.