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Adap.tv, a company offering in-stream contextual ad services for online video, announced the closing of a $10m Series A financing.  Redpoint Ventures and Gemini Israel Funds provided the capital.

Adap.tv’s technology includes proprietary (and patent pending) algorithms for analyzing video content.  Based on that analysis, the company’s software then serves, in real-time, relatively discreet text ads relevant to the users viewing behavior.  It’s a similar concept to the ads on web pages served by Google’s Adsense or Yahoo’s Publisher Network. Adap.tv plans to earn revenue through a combination of pay per performance and revenue sharing.

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Despite a crowded market, many investors including Angels and professional Venture Capitalists are still trying to catch the wave on Internet video.  The focus of most seems to be on niche plays, perhaps to diversify portfolios and hedge against future failures.

Three such deals, all with entertainment professionals onboard, and all added to the Metue Company Watchlist’s, have been announced recently.

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The gaming industry is valued at $37.5b by some measurements and growing.  The Asian Pacific market is expected to be nearly $19b by 2011. 81% of American youth play video games at least a month. Despite such staggering numbers, if you read the words of Electronic Arts CEO, all is not rosy.  Games are becoming too complex, too involved and alienating the mass-market. Their producers are also failing to innovate. So said John Riccitiello in Yesterdays Wallstreet Journal where he was quoted commenting that the industry is "making games that are harder and harder to play" and that "for the most part, the industry has been rinse and repeat."  And he’s right. 

Statistics show the competition for leisure time and entertainment is incredibly fierce and even with convergence in hardware (which now include DVD players and Internet connections) helping expand the gaming marketplace in some ways, the same competition is requiring game publishers and developers to tread carefully; mistakes are costly. A missed opportunity to get a game to market (e.g. a gamble on the wrong platform) or a weak showing from a game with expensive development costs could be a heavy drag on revenues for months.

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Last January comScore reported 70% of the total U.S. Internet audience watched at least one Internet video stream that month. It’s been reported that there are more than 12 million hours of video programming currently hosted online.  YouTube has been reported to have more than 5.1m hours of content.  With such an enormous, and rapidly increasing, pool of content one of the bigger challenges is how to effectively index and search the data.  Without organization, it is too easy as the old saying goes “to be swimming in information but thirsting for knowledge.”

A host of video search companies are lining up to try and address the problem. The approaches vary. Some are focusing on text-to speech technology, others are looking elsewhere. It’s a new market, but one with such potential, that advertisers, eager for contextual delivery, are salivating over the potential.

One of the primary cataloging and search standard used so far has been keywords and meta-tags.  They are user controlled.  To work someone has to manually identify the content and title it appropriately.  Social networking sites allow a wide range of people to share that responsibility (by adding unique “tags” as identifiers) but the trouble with user defined search is that it’s only effective when users use the same vocabulary.  If I say tom-ay-to and you say to –mah-to we could get different results.     Click to Read More

Online game developer K2 Network has announced the closing of a $16m Series B round of venture financing.  The round was led by Intel Capital and also included monies from Greycroft Partners, Khosla Ventures, Novel TMT Ventures, BV Capital and MVP Capital.

The online gaming industry is estimated to reach $10 to 13b in revenue by 2011.  K2 Network, which was founded in 2001, and has a presence in the United States, Korea and India, is focused on so called Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG’s). The company has between  8m to 10m registered users 1 (their website and press releases have slightly different numbers) and a range of titles in its catalog.  The company provides both free to play games and premium subscription services.

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San Diego based internet video-sharing site Veoh has closed its third round of venture capital financing.  The  $26m Series C round was led by Goldman Sachs and also included prior investors Spark Capital and Shelter Capital Partners.

The company, which was launched in 2005, has raised approximately $41m to date.  Former Disney exec Michael Eisner who sits on the board of directors and is among the notable investors through his investment company, Tornante.  Time Warner has also invested.  Unsubstantiated speculation is putting the pre-money valuation for this round somewhere just above $60m.

Like IPTV companies Joost and Babelgum, Veoh offers a Peer to Peer video player but unlike the other two, Veoh has focused more on user-generated content and syndication than on trying to be a content destination.   Users can upload videos of differing sizes or quality levels and Veoh will syndicate them to different video destinations from YouTube to MySpace.   Unlike YouTube, Veoh can handle larger sized video files and higher quality content.   

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What do you get when you take three previous CEO’s from MP3/Online music companies and put them together in one room?   In the case of MusicMatch founder Dennis Mudd (MusicMatch, a pre-iTunes desktop music player, was bought by Yahoo in 2004) former Rio CEO Jim Cady, and iRiver CEO Jonathon Sasse, you get a company called Slacker that’s hoping to do what their prior companies didn’t – capture the digital music market and maybe even break Apple’s stranglehold on the $21b music downloads market.

To help in the effort, Slacker has just closed a $40m Series B financing from investors Centennial Ventures, Rho Ventures, Austin Ventures, Mission Ventures and Sevin Rosen Funds.  That follows a previous $13.5m round announced back in March.

Despite the lazy sounding name, Slacker has big ambitions. Click to Read More