Pixsy, a company that specializes in licensing its image and video search platform to other businesses, has launched a new product called “Premium Feed” that allows publishers to embed clips that can be easily monetized into their sites.

While there are a number of search engines that offer free video clips for embedding, it can be difficult for publishers to monetize these. Using Pixsy’s Premium Feed, publishers can search through video content that already has ads embedded (either as pre-rolls or overlays). Whenever they embed these clips into their websites, they will get a share of the revenues (the actual percentage varies depending on the publisher). All publishers looking to participate in the program have to go through Pixsy’s approval process, but CEO Chase Norlin says it takes as little as a week for new publishers to qualify.

Norlin says that the Pixsy catalog now includes over 2 million clips in its Premium Feed, about half of which come from user generated content. To monetize this user generated content, Pixsy has partnered with a third-party company to perform image and audio transcription which can then be used to embed relevant AdSense Ads. The remaining portion of the Premium Feed comes from ‘professionally generated video’ – content providers who have already included advertising in their clips and are looking for a means to syndicate them.

At launch Pixsy’s Premium Feed partners include Cooliris, a 3D-media browser plugin, as well as Ego TV.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Last year, media search platform Pixsy was in the news for forming a strategic partnership with Veoh, which would let the company play Pixsy videos directly in the page with the help of Pixsy’s new embed feature. Realizing the value of that, Pixsy will unveil a new service called Video Search Playback, that will open its embed feature to any company that asks for permission to use it.

By sending an email to Pixsy asking to use its embed feature, website publishers can embed Pixsy videos into their sites, opening them up to the millions of videos currently offered by the site. So far, Pixsy has approved a handful of publishers to participate in the service, but once it goes live on Thursday, anyone can email Pixsy for inclusion.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

The new service will allow users to search millions of travel photos and videos while simultaneously shopping for travel services.

Pixsy has been on a roll of late, signing deals to power search on sites including Veoh. Pixsy CEO Chase Norlin said that the partnership is a great example of Pixsy’s ability to provide vertical media search solutions to websites in various content categories.

Pixsy was named a Top 50 Coolest Website by Time Magazine and first reviewed by TechCrunch in August 2006.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Pixsy’s appeal to Veoh is the ability to deliver near-real time search results, allowing Veoh users to search videos and images with content updating to the minute.

Dmitry Shapiro, Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Veoh Networks said “Pixsy’s vast index and ability to organize their breadth of video and image content in a way that maps to our users’ interests will meaningfully enhance the viewing experience on Veoh.”

Since taking an additional $26 million in funding back in June, Veoh has seen an increase in traffic whilst facing an increase in lawsuits as well. According to Alexa, Veoh has now broken into the Top 100 sites online, and is edging towards the Top 50. On the other hand their popularity has come at a price, with Veoh being sued by Universal, Viacom and NBC, and perhaps just to keep the lawyers busy, Veoh filed a counter suit against Universal in August.

For Pixsy, the deal will see their technology being used by Veoh’s more than 18 million monthly viewers, validation that their search capabilities not only work, but can scale as well.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Xcavator.net provides natural and intuitive interactive search for stock photography providing buyers with a browsing experience based on both visual content and keywords. The key to the visual search capabilities is the portal’s color and image search engines, powered by CogniSign Intelligent Image Recognition Technology.

In laymen’s terms, Xcavator.net offers three types of interrelated search options. Tradition search delivers photos based on tagged keywords and is much the same as others in the stock photography market. Where Xcavator.net gets interesting is in color and image search. Xcavator.net allows color search matching, for example if a stock photograph was needed that matched a brochure or web site in terms of colors, users are able to refine the photo search to those colors by utilizing a color chart or by inserting the exact hexadecimal color into a box. Image search provides similar photos based on a user uploaded image or via a drag and drop of images found in an initial search.

Xcavator.net competes with other visual search sites including Riya, Pixsy and PicSearch. Xcavator isn’t necessarily better than any of their competitors, but different. The color and related search capabilities don’t have the same level of user enjoyment as Riya’s search features do, yet Xcavator.net’s features feel more practical and are definitely more finely targeted at niche stock photo search.

Xcavator.net recently signed a deal with iStockphoto that delivers 1.8 Million images from 38,000 contributors into the Xcavator.net search database. The site comes out of Beta on July 2.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Pixsy will release a demo site called StarHabit next week and will target bloggers shortly thereafter. More on that below.

Pixsy CEO Chase Norlin, formerly of adverstiser ValueClick, told me that the company’s images are indexed using a combination of facial recognition technology, closed caption reading and audio converted into text. The data is drawn in by RSS. In addition to the Pixsy main page, a page on the domain labled Morpheus Visual Search is interesting.

When I asked about intellectual property concerns, Norlin cited the case Kelly v. Arriba Soft in 2002 as evidence that thumbnails are fair use. Pixsy is of the belief that they and their customers can wrap whatever advertisements they like around thumbnails from anywhere online. Neither Google nor Yahoo! currently places advertisements on the pages containing their thumbnail image results, Ask.com places some at the very bottom of the page. Norin says that publisher will welcome Pixsy search as it will drive more users to their original content. That makes sense to me.

Pixsy will unveil a showcase sight called StarHabit early next week that uses the company’s technology to demonstrate what it hopes will become an important and lucrative part of vertical search. Starhabit will search for photos and video of celebrities.

Shortly thereafter, small publishers like bloggers and social network users will be able to place their own customized Pixsy visual search boxes inside their pages and share an undisclosed portion of the ad revenue from search results pages. Will bloggers go for this? I’m skeptical, unless the UI is designed unusually well. That could happen, but I’m not sure that small publishers will want to pay the price of sending their readers off to a Pixsy domain.

The real potential here could be in licensing thumbnails to enterprise customers. Anyone aggregating text content could well be very interested in combining that data with real time aggregated visual data. I look forward to seeing if there are truly creative uses found for the technology or if Pixsy will instead just contribute to a glut of ad driven visuals online. Hopefully the UI for small publishers will be good enough and the price for large publishers high enough that it will be a quality experience all around.

Pixsy cites numbers finding that visual search is the fastest growing segment of search on the web today and they seem well situated to monetize that market.