Lycos might be one of the last names you’d expect to see associated with the online video darlings YouTube and Hulu. The search-engine-cum-internet-portal that rose to international popularity in the late 90s before crashing down to earth post-bubble-burst certainly hasn’t been on our radar more than a couple of times in the last three years.

But the South Korean-owned holdover is making strides to socialize the online TV show and movie viewing experience with several upgrades to its Lycos Cinema property.

Lycos Cinema launched over a year ago and gave visitors the opportunity to watch older content simultaneously with each other using patented “simulstream” technology. The idea is that half the fun of watching a movie at the theater, or a TV show on the couch, comes from the people around you, and it’s important to preserve that personal relationship element.

The new version of Lycos Cinema is intended to enhance that social experience of simultaneous video playback. Lycos has built out a new XMPP chat client that lets people talk about the shows they are watching. And a redesigned user interface highlights your friends’ media consumption preferences with member profiles that contain personal calendars, watchlists, and recently purchased movies. The site is reminiscent of Evite in that you can invite your friends to screenings and they RSVP appropriately. Friends can also be invited to shows on the fly with a simple URL.

Lycos Cinema is a hybrid video delivery site: much of the content is ad-supported and free, but much of it is also made available on a rental basis (a la iTunes or Amazon Unbox). Pricing is in line with the market at $4 for new releases, with 30 days to start watching and 24 hours to finish. Since this is a social service, however, you can also buy seats for your friends, or the general public, to watch shows with you. It costs $6 to rent for up to 5 people, and $8 for up to 10 people.

Lycos’s efforts are commendable but there’s one huge deficiency to the service: it hasn’t signed with any of the major studios yet so you won’t find all the good content already available on Hulu and its partner sites. Lycos says the new version of Cinema will provide it with a “seat at the table” for discussing these deals, but until they materialize, you’ll have to remain satisfied with content from National Lampoon and a number of small independents.

The video site does have the benefit of being incorporated into the larger Lycos network of properties. Lycos Cinema’s content is given top spots in Lycos search results, for example, and it can certainly be promoted to Lycos’s 20M monthly US uniques in a variety of other ways.

Old school search company Lycos will announce this morning that it’s partnering with video search company Blinkx to power video search on Lycos.com. The video search feature is available now. Everybody wants to nail down video search these days, but Blinkx has some interesting technology. This is the second move by Lycos we’ve reported on this month – new giant email rivaling Gmail’s storage was the first.

Blinkx stands out because it indexes not just text metadata but also the spoken word in video footage via speech recognition. The company reported this summer that it’s now indexed more than 4 million hours of audio and video content. Thus the new Lycos video search page also includes the option to search audio content as well. It’s a lot like Podzinger but for international video, with an emphasis on educational content. Blinkx CTO Suranga Chandratillake told me today that if it’s Brittany Spears you want then it’s Brittany Spears you’ll get at Blinkx – but if it’s a particular phrase being used by Condaleeza Rice on TV, then Blinkx’s technology is really what you are looking for. Just search once and subscribe to the results feed, because you don’t want to go back more than once to the site until it undergoes the redesign Chandratillake tells me is coming. (The UI is injurious.)

Google Video isn’t actually a Google (search the web) for video, Chandratillake says, and so Blinkx seeks to be. I like Blinkx’s search results, I’ve subscribed to several feeds from them for some time and I go to them every time I want to do news video search. I hope that the emerging importance of video search will propel them, or someone with similar technology, past the world of trashy content and marginal partnerships. Perhaps this deal with Lycos will be a good fresh beginning in a new era when video search is believed to be important.

Lycos announced today that their beta email service now offers 3 GB of storage and allow attachments of “essentially unlimited” size to be sent and received. Gmail is currently topping out at 2.75 gigs of storage, Hotmail at 250 MB and both limit attachments to 10 MB. For $20 per year, Lycos will up the limit to 5 GB of storage.

To prevent infrequent use just for sending huge files, there’s a stipulation that Lycos mail accounts that go unused for 30 days will be deleted, but for $6 per year that limit is removed. Upping the storage and attachment size limits will probably be of interest primarily to people working with multimedia files, for which there are plenty of other options online to store and send such files, but adding this functionality to an everyday email account is a good move.

Whether Lycos can offer search and spam filtering as good as Gmail’s remains to be seen. It also stands at a disadvantage via Gmail’s integration with the rest of Google’s offerings. Gmail’s tabbed conversations and ability to view a wide variety of file types as HTML are also features Lycos mail lacks. Links clicked in emails at Lycos can be viewed inline, without leaving your email interface – that’s nice. One way or the other, the email wars continue. Thanks to Gary Price for pointing this out.