Auditude, a video advertising company best known for technology that can identify clients' video content and run ads against it, has raised a $10.5 million Series B funding round from Redpoint Ventures and existing investor Greylock Partners. This brings the company's total funding to $23 million.
Last time we checked in with Auditude, the company had inked a deal with News Corp.'s MySpace and Viacom's MTV Networks to detect both official and user-uploaded MTV content on the social network's MySpaceTV platform. It was seen by many as a savvy antipiracy measure. Since then, Auditude has started powering a broader variety of video ads on MySpace and its MySpace Music product, as well as partnered with Warner Bros. Entertainment. More content deals are on the way, CEO Adam Cahan told CNET News.
"From our perspective, we are looking to work with everybody," Cahan said. "We are trying to tackle what I think is one of the biggest opportunities and challenges on the Internet right now, which is (that) tons of people are watching video, 80 percent of folks out there, and yet very few people are really making a business of this yet."
Redpoint partner Chris Moore will join Auditude's board of directors, which also includes former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta. A member of the short list for the top post at MySpace Music, Van Natta instead took the CEO role at rival streaming service Project Playlist.
VentureBeat reports that Facebook has removed a popular application from its third-party developer platform over potential copyright issues. The application, called Audio, allowed users to upload MP3 files and share them with their friends--yup, that's a recipe for copyright disaster.
Facebook had already axed the app once before, according to the article. It appears that Audio had been created by a single developer, not an existing company.
As VentureBeat's Eric Eldon points out, this shows that Facebook is taking terms-of-service violations seriously when it comes to the Platform, which was launched in late May and catapulted the already-popular company to the upper echelon of Silicon Valley's elite. It's a crucial PR move for the company, considering recent reports that third-party applications made by non-Facebook developers may make identity theft and fraud easier. But it's also just a smart move: we're all more than aware by now that you really don't want to mess with music copyright infringement.- prev
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