AOL launches video portals internationally

By Kenneth Li

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Time Warner Inc's AOL Internet division will launch versions of its video service in Canada, India and Taiwan on Thursday as part of an aggressive global expansion.

By autumn, it will also introduce versions of its video portal, AOL Video ( video.aol.com ), in the United Kingdom, France and Germany, AOL Video senior vice president Fred McIntyre said in an interview.

The expansion is part of Time Warner's plans to refashion AOL as a free, advertising-dependent Web site, as well as to transform itself into a one-stop shop for advertising services for other companies.

"If you look at usage patterns on online video, it is the first global broadband user behaviour," McIntyre said. "It happened everywhere in the world at the same time."

International availability of online videos from the United States has been held up by copyright licenses, which are negotiated on a regional basis, Internet executives said this week at the Reuters Global Media and Telecoms Summit.

But AOL said it has sealed deals with local programming partners for its regional sites. The availability of shows from U.S. programming partners, such as Hulu, a joint venture of News Corp and General Electric's NBC Universal, or CBS Corp, is unclear and varies depending on partners

The foundation of the services is built around AOL's video search technology, Truveo, which has indexed, or searched and sorted related information on than 170 million videos in 16 countries including: Russia, Hong Kong, Germany and France.

"What users are interested in, and what the biggest problems are, usually is about not being able to find what they're looking for," McIntyre said.