Autonomy, a small British software group, has been working on a potentially breakthrough effort that could pit it against Yahoo and Google and allow it to partner with the world's biggest movie houses, according to a Financial Times article last week. Autonomy is working out of Beijing, where it has signed a joint venture with China Netcom Broadband (CNCBB), one of China's biggest internet companies - with more than 110 million subscribers. They have agreed to create a service allowing Chinese consumers to search for news and video clips from 25 local and national TV companies over the internet.

Autonomy software searches and catalogs unstructured data - emails, photos, video - and has so far been used by companies to sort through in-house data. But Autonomy wants to expand beyond the corporate market. Search engine Blinkx, which is powered by Autonomy technology, does exactly that - but on a small scale. The China deal would take the technology into the big leagues, on the eve of what some consider the inevitable convergence of TV and the internet, when such search services would become invaluable.

"The company that provides an easy-to-use and popular video and TV search will end up having a big influence over what material consumers watch in the future," according to the FT article.

Whereas Google and Yahoo rely on manual tagging to catalog video content so that it can be searched using key words, Autonomy uses voice recognition software, which automatically catalogs every spoken word in footage. That technology also gives it an edge over its competition in China, including Google, MSN and Yahoo, because their keyword search engines have problems with ideogram-based text.