AOL Opens Video Search Engine to Developers

mytrip writes to tell us CNet is reporting that AOL has opened up their video search engine to developers. This push is being made in the hopes that it will drive more websites into using their service. From the article: "The goal for the APIs is different than the one that AOL had in mind when it opened up a number of its other applications to developers — notably its instant-messaging client AIM and IP telephony service AIM Phoneline. The AIM and AIM Phoneline toolkits were designed to enable modifications to the existing software, whereas the purpose of the new video-search APIs is to spread its video search engine to sites other than AOL."

Comments

Just what I wanted

[Somatic]

More ways to use AOL services! It's kind of like being given different ways to stab yourself in the eye.

Re:AOL has some real hurdles

[wfberg]

When AOL partly funded mozilla, it was already in its downward spiral. AOL was never a great company, but it was at one time a fucking huge company worth bajillions on the stock market.

Up until the dotcom hype, AOLs businessmodel was pretty simple; you sell a subscription service that is slightly (but not vastly) expensive. Obviously, to maximize profits from subscriptions (and to make sure you don't suddenly lose 50% of your income from one month to the next) you have to make it hard for people to quit, and easy to signup (hence the AOL coasters that you got in the mail, magazines, etc.)

It's a fairly straightforward business; you provide a simple service and try not to annoy people so much that it seems worth their time to jump through the hoops to cancel their subscription. Much like bland, unadventurous magazines and newspapers - their contents is maybe 10% useful and the rest is filler, but they stay clear of printing too much gore or "incest - how to?" columns. And they flood you with those subscription inserts.

Then the dotcom hype happened, which meant that AOL was now worth bajillions based on basically it's name. "America" - can't go wrong there, you don't want to invest in Lithuania, and "Online", well, that has dotcom written all over it.

In this period they did the stuff like fund mozilla, and buy the guys behind winamp (whose media player hasn't improved vastly, but their shoutcast streaming audio site is just how streaming audio should be).

Then, after the dotcom crash (and Time Warners (reverse)takeover of/merger with AOL) came the stark reality of post-dotcomhype business. Being an ISP is no longer a simple affair - with technlogies like cable (docsis 1.0, 2.0), (V)(H)(A)DSL (1/2+) being upgraded every two years, the death of dialup at the time where dialup had just become so ubiquitous that it's built into telephone exchanges; there's not much value in being an ISP (too much competition) and doing it right is hard. AOL had always been doing the ISP bit a bit halfheartedly, and even with TimeWarner on board, they found they can't really be a persuasive content company!

So, cut to present time, and AOL is trying its damn hardest to get away from being an ISP, and to be as much as Google and Yahoo as they can.

There's no reason they shouldn't be good at the things Yahoo and Google do. Except that they've sullied their brandname by sucking at everything they've ever done. And being mismanaged.

Opening up AIM and trying to get their video search on other people's sites is just recognizing a simple fact; their brand sucks. They desperately need people to use their services first, find out they're worth using, and then worry about reeling them into 'the AOL experience' (with AOL's ads) later.

AOL's best bet would be to start doing stuff under different brand names, if possible to set up small companies with just a few people, with a start-up kind of atmosphere, where they don't have to bother much about tying into AOL's infrastructure (and management structure) beyond perhaps using AIM screennames as some sort of single sign on mechanism.