Webware

One True Media, the parent company of an online video ad creator called SpotMixer, has announced a fresh $9 million in Series B venture funding. The round was led by DAG Ventures, with contributions from NTT Finance and existing investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Amid widespread financial difficulties (to say the least) in the media business, SpotMixer and its new investors are pitching it as a cost-cutting option for small companies.

"While the market opportunity for video advertising remains well-defined, smaller businesses are more concerned than ever about how to most cost-effectively spend their limited advertising dollars," said DAG managing director Young Chung, who has joined One True Media's board of directors. "SpotMixer has quickly established itself as one of the most innovative and thoughtful solutions that will enable accelerated growth around this major advertising trend."

In conjunction, SpotMixer announced that it has been appointed the first official "authorized reseller" of Google's AdWords service for videos. This means that SpotMixer clients will be able to directly distribute their ads using Google's ad platform in addition to creating them online.

SpotMixer charges clients a minimum of $49 per month for access to its online tools, which are effectively a souped-up version of the many Web-based video "mixing" services out there. Then they can shoot them out across the Web with video embed codes or ad campaigns on the Web or cable TV.

Making the advertising process cheaper and easier is certainly a good pitch during a recession, but there's a flip side, too: Small companies with tightening budgets could easily opt to nix video ads altogether, sticking with the more familiar territory of text or display advertising. SpotMixer, on the other hand, maintains that video ads are more effective

Digitalsmiths, a video indexing, analytics, and publishing firm, announced Thursday that it closed a $12 million Series B round of funding that was led by .406 Ventures, Aurora Funds, and Chrysalis Ventures.

According to Digitalsmiths CEO Ben Weinberger, the funding will be used to accelerate the company's product development and provide advertisers with the information they need to monetize more online video.

But monetizing that video may not be as easy as it could have been just a few months ago. Numerous reports suggest online advertising is slowing and monetizing online video is still relatively vexing for major players in the market like YouTube.

So far, Digitalsmiths has been able to perform relatively well and attracted TheWB.com and pulled TMZ away from Brightcove. But with Brightcove showing no signs of losing ground and other competitors like Viewdle making inroads, being more attractive to clients may not be as easy for Digitalsmiths as it may want to believe.

A new kind of video advertising is coming to MySpace.

The company has partnered with a video advertising company, Auditude, and Viacom's MTV Networks division, to bring Auditude's video ads to MTV content on the News Corp.-owned social network's MySpaceTV video hub.

Here's how Auditude works: it can detect MTV Networks content if either MTVN itself or a MySpace user uploads it, and then it implements both targeted ads and "attribution ads," which provide data about the source of the programming. (For example: an "attribution ad" for Comedy Central talk show The Colbert Report could include information about when the program is broadcast on-air.)

Right now, according to a joint release, Auditude already has four years' worth of 100 television channels indexed in its database, plus 250 million standalone videos.

"As one of the leading providers of online video in the world, we give our fans the power not only to consume our content, but also to share and interact with it across the Web," Mika Salmi, president of global digital media at MTV Networks, said in a release. "With Auditude's solution, we can continue to give users the freedom to take our content wherever they go online, while ensuring that we can monetize it as well."

This is a bit of a surprise coming from Viacom, which sued Google's YouTube over the distribution of pirated content. MySpace has reason to feel jilted by YouTube, too--it's no secret that News Corp. had been interested in acquiring YouTube, which can credit a big part of its rise to embedded videos on MySpace profiles, before Google outbid it.

Auditude says that its technology is compatible with YouTube, as well as Veoh, AOL Video, Dailymotion, and others.

But despite Viacom's beef with YouTube, content from MTV Networks can be viewed on a number of partner sites, like Imeem and Veoh, and episodes of Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report are available on Hulu, the joint video venture between NBC Universal and News Corp.

MTV Networks also recently launched MTVMusic.com, a compendium of the longstanding pop-culture brand's music videos.

Heavy, a niche video content company focused on the "dude" demographic, is slimming down.

The company said Wednesday it will spin off Husky Media, its video advertising platform, into a separate company. It'll remain under Heavy's oversight alongside the Heavy.com portal, but will be run by a different team.

Husky Media operates a technology called Video-Skin, which lets bloggers and other publishers "wrap" any video player in Husky ads and then pull in revenue. Husky also runs a Video Guide that offers publishers a library of video content in exchange for splitting ad profits.

Also on Wednesday, Heavy announced that its Burly Sports Show program will be syndicated on CBSSports.com, with ads served by the Husky platform.

Disclaimer: CBSSports.com is owned by CBS, which has agreed to acquire CNET Networks, publisher of News.com. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter.

Last year VideoClix.TV demoed an early version of its creepy, yet intelligent video advertising technology in an episode of Revision3's Diggnation, the popular podcast starring Digg.com's Kevin Rose and co-host Alex Albrecht. The technology, which inserts clickable advertising in every element of the video, gives users a way to be linked up to online retailers for any product or service that's seen in videos. It also lets users click on things not for sale to see any related information from elsewhere on the Web--a handy service that's usually ended up with horribly annoying results when applied to text ads (see IntelliTXT).

Today the company announced it will be put into use in all of Revision3's programming--starting with the latest episode of Diggnation filmed last week in Amsterdam. Other Revision3 shows will follow, including Tekzilla, The Totally Rad Show, and Internet Superstar. In its first version, users were required to download the video and play it back in Apple's QuickTime player to get the technology to work. However, in the latest model, the self-contained Flash player now includes small overlays that pop-up from the right side of the player and link off-site. There's also an entire list of embedded objects users can browse. Clicking any of them will skip ahead to the part of the show.

What the technology brings to the table is an alternative to the pre, post, and video overlay models of advertising usually seen in Web video. Services such as Asterpix have been moving toward such a model, linking to information or reference sites over advertising alone. Personally I find it much more useful and fun to use than current iterations of overlay ads, although I'm sure video purists will be turned off by how much product placement can be intentionally packed into videos without them even realizing it.

You can test out the new technology with the latest episode of Diggnation here. You can also check out the earlier iteration of the technology from a show filmed in 2007.

VideoClix.TV ads show up as small overlays on the side of the video. Seen here is clicking on Alex Albrecht's red laptop, which links up to the product page on Best Buy. Creeped out yet?

(Credit: CNET Networks)

This post was updated at 10:12 AM PT to correct the spelling of Joost CEO Mike Volpi's name.

Could a browser-based version of its peer-to-peer software save Joost, the heavily hyped video start-up founded by the creators of Skype and Kazaa?

Portfolio's Kevin Maney wrote a lengthy profile of the once-hot company, and buried inside is a juicy tidbit about a future development: "This year, viewers will be able to watch Joost videos in a browser window," the profile read. Right now, Joost requires a software download, which critics have said is one of its prime setbacks when just about every other online video start-up is browser-based. "Go to Joost's Web site, click on shows like Seth Green's edgy Robot Chicken or an old Rocky and Bullwinkle episode and you can watch them as easily as you'd watch a video on YouTube." Well, that all depends on the technology working as smoothly as YouTube, and the quality being up to par.

Representatives from Joost were not immediately available to confirm that a Web-based version of the video player is on track for later in 2008.

Joost could use a boost. Once touted as a "YouTube killer" that would address rampant online video piracy by offering professional content creators access to a high-quality video platform and revenue from top-notch advertisers, it fell from favor when the content proved tepid and more enticing competitors sprang up--namely Hulu, the joint video venture between NBC Universal and News Corp.

Recently, CBS Interactive President Quincy Smith, whose company counts Joost among the partners in its "Audience Network" of online video outlets, said that he hasn't given up on it and that CEO Mike Volpi "knows what he's doing."

And perhaps Joost can resuscitate itself. While the Web-based Joost remains shadowy, the company has been making other moves: experimenting with live TV programming, for one, starting with the NCAA basketball championship. It's a good PR move, as the availability of "March Madness" games has, at least for now, put Joost back into the vocabulary of Web users--and onto the computer screens of workplace procrastinators.

While I've never seen an actual Gmail commercial on TV, Google continues its grassroots style advertising for the Web service. I'm still surprised when I meet people who don't have a Google account, so clearly these ads might be necessary.

This one, put together by the Russian branch of marketing company Saatchi & Saatchi shows two men putting together a massive reproduction of Gmail's in-box, chat, and mobile features made out of various materials including modeling clay, Lego bricks, paint, and fabrics. Other parts were put together with printed paper and some elbow grease. Keep on the lookout for the giant mouse-pointer-on-a-stick that can change from an arrow to a finger, sure to be a big hit at Halloween later this year.

[via Valleywag]

You can't really keep anything a secret in the New York media industry, but Google managed to do a pretty good job of it on Wednesday night.

The Mountain View megalith rented out the Terminal 5 uberclub on the West Side for an event it called "Videocracy," which is Google-ese for "Hey, advertisers, this is why you should cozy up to YouTube." The company also reportedly made a number of hints at the video site's direction, talking about some in-the-works features.

It was a strictly no-press event; Silicon Alley Insider reporter Michael Learmonth weaseled his way into the open-bar party, only to be given the boot moments later. (I unfortunately didn't try to sneak in. I was downtown, where TheStreet.com was celebrating the launch of its new Mainstreet site. Jim Cramer is shorter than I expected he'd be.)

But secret spies tell CNET News.com that not only were YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen there, so were a number of the site's biggest stars, like "Chocolate Rain" singer Tay Zonday and fashionisto William Sledd.

And Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer wrote a brief recap of the event on his personal blog, detailing some of the upgrades that are in development at YouTube.

According to Schafer, the site will soon be launching video recommendations based on prior viewing history; think StumbleUpon or Amazon Recommendations. Also mentioned were "active sharing," a beta feature that displays which users have recently watched a video (consider it the YouTube equivalent of Facebook's social ads), improvements to YouTube's video-editing tools, and the expansion of YouTube's content to platforms beyond the PC.

"Steve Chen is excited about content on really, really big TVs," Schafer wrote.

Yahoo announced Tuesday that it has snapped up online video platform provider Maven Networks, in a $160 million deal.

What makes the transaction particularly interesting is that it comes as Yahoo is butting heads with Microsoft, which not so very long ago launched a $44.6 billion unsolicited bid for Yahoo. As the companies fight over Yahoo's proper valuation, add to the mix the Maven acquisition.

Yahoo and Maven were apparently in merger talks before the Microsoft bid surfaced, with the deal reportedly on the verge of getting inked on Jan. 31 or Feb. 1, according to reports. Microsoft went public with its multibillion-dollar buyout offer on Feb. 1, a fact that no doubt proved something of a distraction to the Yahoo-Maven deal.

Nonetheless, the Maven deal moved forward and here's what Yahoo hopes to get out of it:

Yahoo is aiming to bolster its video content syndication and video advertising capabilities to publishers and advertisers. Maven develops video publishing platforms designed to allow publishers to dish up videos to consumers through a range of media players, along with media management and workflow technologies.

From that you would likely see Yahoo trying to meld its library of licensed video content, as well as its relationships with advertisers and Web publishers, with Maven's technology to manage and distribute online video to such media company titans as Fox News, Sony BMG, and Gannett.

Maven will retain its operations in Cambridge, Mass., and operate as a wholly owned Yahoo subsidiary. Or perhaps one day, a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary.