Autonomy, the small British information software company, has been diligently working on a potentially breakthrough campaign that could pit it against the might of Yahoo and Google, and take it into partnership with the biggest movie houses in the world, says this FT story.

But its efforts are being led out of Beijing, where 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.

Google, MSN and Yahoo have failed to capture the Chinese search engine market in the same way as they have in the US and Europe, mainly because their key-word search engines struggle with the ideogram-based alphabet, says the story.

Autonomy also has a tie-up with Blinkx, the video search engine, and Blinkx will provide the front-end and branding for the venture.