Online company AOL on Tuesday said it had closed a deal in December to purchase Truveo Inc., a video search company.
Financial terms of the deal were not provided.
The deal was the largest purchase by the Time Warner Inc. division in 2005 and smaller than the $435 million purchase of Advertising.com in 2004, an AOL spokesman said.
AOL, which is in the process of relying less on subscription revenue from a declining membership to its online service, has been offering more of its programming for free to boost online advertising revenue.
The deal comes amid growing interest among media and technology companies to make more shows and programming available to consumers anywhere and at any time.
Google Inc. last week introduced a new video service with programming from CBS Corp. and the National Basketball Association.
Truveo will provide better video search features on AOL.com, which recently launched a video service that will offer thousands of vintage television episodes.
Truveo uses a technology it calls “Visual Crawling,” which “automatically discover(s) video files and related information on complex ... Web pages,” AOL said in a statement.
With the roster of shows and user-generated video growing online, finding them could be difficult, analysts have said.
Last year, it purchased five companies, including a wireless company Wildseed Ltd. and Weblogs Inc., which owns the popular gadget blog, or unfiltered online commentary, Engadget, the company said.