The FT carried an intriguing piece over the weekend, Autonomy positions itself for content wars, which covered the Bayesian search pioneer's efforts to position itself as a key player in the search sector for the media industry (primarily video):

"Autonomy has just signed a joint venture with China Netcom Broadband (CNCBB), one of China's biggest internet companies with more than 110m subscribers. ... The pair have agreed to create a service that will allow Chinese consumers to search for news and video clips from 25 local and national TV companies over the internet."

"What happens when there are not just hundreds, but thousands of programmes that can be accessed from all over the internet? ... That is where Google, Yahoo and Autonomy hope to play a role."

Clearly, Autonomy's technology has some strengths in this area, which is why it is apparently being used for voice recognition by the security services, and using China as a staging area seems like a bright idea.

As the BBC's announcement that the corporastion will broadcast its main TV channels online demonstrates, this is set to be a big area of innovation and competition in the near future.