blinkx, the Aim-listed video search group, will today enter the increasingly crowded market for online television.

blinkx Broadband TV will initially offer independent films and news free of charge, delivered over the internet but with picture quality on a par with ordinary TV. The company, spun out of Autonomy, the software developer, last May, hopes niche programming and high levels of interactivity will differentiate BBTV from its rivals.

Joost and Babelgum have both been running similar internet TV services for more than a year. But broadcaster-led services, such as the BBC’s iPlayer and US-based Hulu appear to have had greater success in this fast-developing area, thanks to their larger base of well-known programming.

At launch, blinkx’s only content partners for BBTV are Dogwoof Pictures, an independent film distributor, and ITN, the UK-based news group. Suranga Chandratillake, chief executive, defended the targeted approach, saying that “niche markets, assuming they get to a certain scale, are very interesting to advertisers”.

blinkx has signed hundreds of content deals for its core blinkx.com website, where users can search through millions of video clips, mostly licensed from smaller media companies but also from the likes of Fox and NBC, the US networks that founded Hulu.

BBTV will focus on content that is hard to find on ordinary television, while its audio and visual search will enable users to jump to particular speech, or look up people and phrases on websites such as Google and IMDB.

“Internet TV has to give you something [regular] TV doesn’t give you,” said Mr Chandratillake. “We let you use the content as a jumping point to the rest of the web.”

Mr Chandratillake expects BBTV’s business model to be largely advertising-funded and free to view.

Rajeev Bahl, analyst at Piper Jaffray, is expecting revenues of £1.6m from BBTV in its first year, about 10 per cent of blinkx’s total expected sales for the year to March 2009.

The rest should come from blinkx.com advertising revenue.