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Every year, the celebrities and power brokers of big business converge on Sun Valley, Idaho for the pinnacle of exclusive schmooze and booze deal making conferences. Investment banker Herb Allen’s five day event is legendary.  This year, it began officially on Wednesday, under the scenic skies of the mountain resort town.

Guests with the privilege of attending include such heavyweights of media and technology as Rupert Murdoch (News Corp), Robert Iger of Disney, Jerry Yang and Terry Semel from Yahoo, Warren Buffet, Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates and others.  Also on the guest list are the folks from a number of high profile, high-buzz startups including representatives from IPTV player Joost, from news aggregator Digg, from Facebook, even newly funded Ning.

Between golf, meetings and private events,  among the crowd, ideas are circulated by the pine trees or the pools. In the boardroom or lounges, strategies and business cards are exchanged. Partnerships are contemplated. 

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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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Look out ESPN, forget baseball tonight….I’m making my own highlight reel.

Marketers are increasingly embracing new internet technologies and experimenting with new ways to build brands.  Today, to coincide with the All Star Game in San Francisco, Major League Baseball is set to expand on marketers use of Internet video with the launch of a new interactive marketing campaign.  The Internet home for the multimedia campaign will be a website called  Actober.com, which is tagged with the slogan “You’re a fan, Act like one.” On the site, fans will be able use easy embedded tools to create their own highlight films.

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Peer to peer television over the Internet, a niche of so called IPTV, is an industry in its infancy.  That hasn’t stopped investors from making huge bets on its future.   So far, combined investments have climbed into the hundred million dollar range (Veoh has received more than $40m and Joost has received $45m).  With such high stakes, the three early leaders, Babelgum, Joost and Veoh, are finding themselves in a heated race to capture marketshare as early, and as fast, as possible. Amongst this competition, exclusive content, the kind of “find it only here” video that might lure audiences from a competitor, and help separate the otherwise similar services, is revealing itself to be major part of strategy.

Today,  The Hollywood Reporter reports Joost will announce a major exclusive content deal with Viacom’s VH1 sometime this week.   According to the initial report, Joost’s 500k member audience will be able to watch the entire premier season of VH1’s new comedy series ten days ahead of the series Television broadcast premier. 
The episodes will run with advertising to support them.

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Friday, the first of obstacles to Microsoft’s planned $6b purchase of Internet advertising firm, aQuantive was passed without incident.  

It was disclosed in an SEC filing that the Federal Trade Commission “waiting period,” a time window set aside for regulators to formally request more information, expired without any further requests. 

Under the terms of the Hart Scott Rodino Antitrust Act (HSR), companies are required to give regulators a 30 day window to request further information.  The expiration of the waiting period absent further inquiry means there will be no further anti-trust review.   Legally the transaction is deemed to have satisfied the requirements of the Act.

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It’s been said that “statistics are like bikinis.  What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.”  Similarly, Arthur Conan Doyle’s famed Sherlock Holmes once spouted off that it’s “a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.”

These days there’s usual more data than there is time to process it, and much might leave even Sherlock scratching his head, still some of the raw data can be revealing.  Over the past few weeks, Metue has published two collections of raw statistics (Click for Part one and Part two). Here’s part three of the three part series showcasing a sampling of recent media statistics that to lend themselves to insights into the crossed, intersecting world of media, entertainment and technology.

(Editors Note: In future weeks, a dedicated page may be added to Metue to house more of this kind of information. Stay tuned. Several site additions are in development or under consideration ):

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