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Eight figure funding rounds for net video companies are starting to become frighteningly familiar.  Joining Joost, Brightcove, and Veoh,  Palo Alto based Metacafe has become the latest winner of the high-valuation funding lottery.

It was announced today that the company closed a $30m 3rd Round of financing.  The deal was led by Highland Capital Partners and DAG Ventures.  Previous investors Accel and Benchmark also participated (Accel has also invested in Brightcove).  The cumulative investment in the video portal now exceeds $50m. Click to Read More

Adobe’s Flash has been the defacto standard for web video clips.  It’s proponents range from major networks to YouTube. They’re all attracted to its relative ease of implementation.  It’s ubiquity is attractive to. The Flash player is browser based and resident on well upward of 90% of desktop computers.  Flash is also widely used and well represented with portables and hand-held devices.

Where Flash has struggled (if you can characterize a market leader as struggling) are issues related to speed and image quality.  Small competitors like Move Networks have been able to find opportunity with big clients (Discovery Communications and ABC) by selling against those weaknesses.  They push a higher quality video that plays with less pre-load time and buffering; desirable features for full length television shows and features.   (Streaming video content plays while simultaneously downloading the rest of the video.  The time cushion between what is playing and what is downloading still is often called “buffer time”)

Tuesday, Adobe quietly addressed one of the weaknesses with an offering code-named Moviestar. Click to Read More

In what is likely the end of MTV’s Urge music service, Viacom’s MTV Networks and Real Networks have shaken hands on a deal to launch a music store joint venture to compete against iTunes.

The Urge music service will merge with Real Networks Rhapsody service to form Rhapsody America.  Music from the combined entity will be available via the net as well as through an integrated service with Verizon’s VCast cell phone service.

Financial details and other terms weren’t immediately disclosed but review of the 8-K filing with the SEC shed a detailed light on the joint venture. 

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For all the hype, the battle to define a next generation DVD standard hasn’t yet been winning hearts and minds.  Ask an average consumer “Bluray or HD DVD?” and most will give an indifferent sigh or a puzzled “huh?”  There’s no urgency to buy absent a single unified standard.

Only about 3million high definition discs have sold so far (both formats combined).  In contrast, standard definition DVD’s sell about a billion units in the U.S. every year.

Those facts haven’t stopped technology giants, and their competing camps, from raging an all out marketing war for the future.   In one corner there’s Sony, inventor, tech giant and proud father of yet another proprietary technology: BluRay.  They’re hoping BluRay will win, and not join Betamax and the Memory Stick in their archives of “Close but not quite.”  On the other side, there’s Toshiba and its partners championing their less expensive, evolutionary solution. 

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Today’s a witching day for Tribune Co.  After months of waiting the shareholders of the media giant will converge on Chicago to issue their votes of Yay or Nay on Sam Zell’s $8.4b leveraged buyout. As much as the deal should be a foregone conclusion, there’s enough uncertainty to make for a crazy day… even with shareholder approval almost assured. 

Leading the charge of trouble is the company’s growing debt.   Tribune already borrowed $7b to buy back shares as part of the deal.  It is obligated to repay $1.5b of that within two years.  The company will also borrow more than $4b more to buy out additional shares. 

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Will the next Simpson’s or Family Guy find its start online?  A small Israeli startup called Aniboom hopes so.

The company, which was founded a year ago and has raised about $4.5m in financing, thinks it can be an ideal venue for connecting animators and producers, and provide a forum in which new ideas can be test marketed.

If Aniboom were described as a Hollywood pitch, the kind of mashup of past hits that goes like “a cross between Princess Bride and Die Hard”, the tagline might be “YouTube meets Talent Agent.”

So far more than 2500 animators from around the globe are using the site.

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While the theories of technology convergence lend themselves toward the marriage of the set-top box and the TV, the stand alone TV peripheral isn’t ready to go away.  Just the opposite, from Apple TV to efforts from Cisco and Motorola to Tivo, the set-top box continues to try and reinvent itself as its own model for a convergence device.

Entering the fray with a Hollywood caliber entrance (in the form of a substantial new financing) is Building B, a year old company founded by former semiconductor entrepreneur and Harvard professor Buno Pati and Chaired by Phil Wise, the former CTO of Sony of America.

Building B hasn’t gone far beyond cryptic descriptions and buzzwords in public description of their stealth startup and in-development hardware but they have convinced investors there’s substance behind their speech.  In a first round, just closed, the company has secured $17.5m

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