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AOL to launch video portal in India soon

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CIOL Bureau
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NEW YORK, USA: 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 (http://video.aol.com), in the UK, 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 website, as well as to transform itself into a one-stop shop for advertising services for other companies.

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

International availability of online videos from the US 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.

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The availability of shows from US 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.

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As part of AOL's expansion, it will also begin offering local versions of its men's lifestyle site Asylum in the UK, India, Australia, New Zealand and Italy.

Each region will have a local editor that will syndicate programming from the US version as well as create local content.

Asylum, launched in the US in December, will also be introduced in other parts of Europe and South America this year.

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Despite its sluggish online advertising growth over the last few quarters, AOL.com has been riding a high, attracting record numbers of visitors, according to comScore Media Metrix.

Unique visitors to AOL's programming sites rose 12 per cent to 55.4 million in April, its seventh consecutive month of growth.

But it has yet to generate bigger ad sales from its popularity.

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