At a press conference that AOL (NYSE: TWX) held on the sidelines of the Fortune Global Forum, the company announced the launch of local language portals in Hindi and Tamil, and the launch of video search Truveo; Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner President and COO reiterated the importance of India for Time Warner, saying that AOL plays an important part in teaching the company what is possible in India.

The local language portals focus on advertiser friendly verticals like Movies, Astrology and News. There isn’t much content up yet, and AOL doesn’t want to talk about where they’ve sourced the content from. No numbers on how the India site is doing from the execs either: P.G. Ponappa, Head of AOLs India portal told me that they came into the market with the goal of having a presence, at least one distribution deal and local language content, and they’re on target for now. They’ve got two distribution deals in place - with MTNL and HP computers, where AOL will be set as the default homepage on new ADSL connections and new laptops respectively. AOL wants to be a significant player in India in three years, and Ponappa says that they need a reasonably high growth next year.

Tim Tuttle, co-founder of Truveo and SVP AOL Video told me that relevant video content from Truveo will be integrated with content at AOL.in. They haven’t added advertising to the video search yet, but that will probably be done. On issues of copyright content and pornography related to video search, Tuttle said that Truveo is limited to trusted content providers...I think Truveo needs to do a rethink on the content providers they index—they’re indexing video sharing sites like Dekhona, which have pornographic content that shows up on Truveo search (I’ve got a screencap).