Video search provider Blinkx sharpened its defense and offense against a possible buyout from Google or Yahoo today, announcing new pacts with several major online partners, one of which happens to be owned by Microsoft.

The new deals between Blinkx and MSN UK, Russian Internet portal Rambler, and Elo Company center around Blinx's newly rolled out Red Label, a program designed to give partners customizable access to Blinkx's video search engine and the up to 26 million hours of video content in the Blinkx index.

Through the deal with MSN UK, the video content in the Blinkx index will become searchable via Microsoft Live Search throughout the United Kingdom.

In the agreement with Rambler, Blinkx will power video search for the Russian portal, giving users access to an index of over three million Russian-language video clips. Under terms of the arrangement, advertising revenue from the project will be shared by Blinkx and Rambler.

Elo, on the other hand, will partner with Blinkx in a new initiative called Blinkx Brasil, which will use Blinkx's broadband TV technology to deliver video from Elo's library of premium content. The beta version of Blinkx Brasil will be available through a free software download from both the Blinkx and Elo Web sites.

Meanwhile, Blinkx has lately been the subject of acquisition rumors involving not just Google and Yahoo but other players.

"Speculation is rising around a potential acquisition of Blinkx, a video search engine, by either Google or News Corp. (and possibly Yahoo)," noted a blog posting in May by Heather Dougherty, director of research at the Hitwise market research firm.

"Traffic to Blinkx has increased steadily over the past year. [The] market share of visits for the week ending May 10, 2008 is 10x higher than the same week in 2007. Much of this growth is being driven by new users, since 62% of the traffic to Blinkx during the same timeframe had not visited the Web site in the past 30 days," according to the analyst.

Since then, Google's legal struggles over YouTube's allegedly illegal use of Viacom's video content intensified somewhat, though Viacom did decide on Monday not to pursue its request for YouTube users' IP addresses.

Both Google and Yahoo also offer video search; and Yahoo also runs a Web-based video sharing service as well, after its purchase of Jumpcut in the fall of 2006, though that doesn't seem to be publicized in recent months. Blinkx's search engine, however, is touted as using a mix of conceptual search, speech recognition, and visual analysis software to specifically find and "quality" video.

Blinkx's new Red Label program for partners is available in both a fully hosted version and an XML-based edition.