Blinkx, Britain’s answer to YouTube, has made an initial approach to buy Miva, the American search-based advertising network, for $41 million, as it aims to accelerate its expansion in targeted online advertising.

The online video search engine, which claims to be the largest single source of video on the web, makes its money from sharing advertising revenue generated by a site that displays a clip found by Blinkx’s engine.

Fourteen months after listing on AIM, after its demerger from Autonomy, the company attracts five million searches a day and recently outstripped Google Video in Britain.

Blinkx has indexed 26 million hours of video and has more than 350 partners around the world, including Channel 4, the BBC and Ask.com.

Suranga Chandratillake, the group’s founder and chief executive, is determined to expand its network and believes that buying Miva is a short-cut. Mr Chandratillake said: “It is a simple argument really. They have got a large distribution network, while we have great technology.”

Miva is forecast to generate advertising revenues of $140 million this year compared with $17 million for Blinkx. Shares in Blinkx rose 2¾p to 32p.

Alphameric soared by 36.6 per cent – 6½p to 24¼p – after the High Court ruled in favour of its Amalgamated Racing joint venture in a case brought against it by a group of bookmakers including Ladbrokes and William Hill. The ruling will allow Amalgamated, via its Turf TV services, to continue to market and sell the television and data rights of 31 racecourses.

Shares in Plasmon crashed 56.6 per cent to 1¼p after the data storage group reduced its sales expectations for the full year after disappointing first-quarter trading.

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