YuMe, the first dedicated advertising network created and optimized for broadband video, has recently unveiled its full suite of interactive ad products that will revolutionize the way advertisers buy video advertising and improve the relevancy of the video advertising for every viewer-regardless of device or platform.

With the proliferation of online video, both professional and user- generated, consumers are dictating how and when they consume video content. Using these new ad placements, advertisers will for the first time be able to target, monitor and optimize online video advertising in real-time through organized channels of content, across any Internet enabled platform — broadband, mobile, IPTV, or download, or even peer-to-peer. What may work in an hour long drama may not be effective in a five minute consumer generated media clip. With YuMe, advertisers can now experiment and determine the ideal ad placement based on a campaign’s goals and its ideally matched content genre. Read the rest of this entry »

blinkx, a video search engine, has launched adHoc, a contexually-relevant video advertising platform. This is truly the first contextual video ad platform. Just like Google Adsense matches text ads and making them contextually relevant (contextual advertising), the blinkx AdHoc contextual video platform matches compelling, customized, TV-style ads to an audience on the video internet.

blinkx’s distribution strategy is now the de facto standard for video search on the Web, so the natural evolution is to apply that technology to the automatic selection of ads. AdHoc leverages blinkx’s patented speech-to-text transcription and visual analysis technology to understand video content more thoroughly and effectively than any other service today, and can therefore dynamically place the most pertinent advertising against it.

blinkx’s AdHoc platform offers content partners and advertisers a unique value proposition — video advertising which combines the emotive power of TV promotion, with the relevance and utility of contextual search advertising. This is an exciting prospect, not only in terms of enhancing viewer experience, but also in increasing the effectiveness of campaigns.

In addition to its relevance, the AdHoc platform offers media companies and advertisers the most flexible solution for customizing the timing and appearance of video ads, with options that include pre-, post- and mid-roll placement, as well as dynamically-selected banners, in-video mini- banners and a unique, post-roll catalog view. Partners can even select which ad databases to leverage — their own, the blinkx AdHoc platform, or even external ad systems, such as Google’s AdWords.

The AdHoc platform is available to advertisers, media companies and other partners effective immediately.

MediaRiver, creators of the next-generation ClickSurge web publishing platform, has announced a new customer in Pixsy Corporation, an award-winning media search platform that powers private label image and video search engines.

Pixsy has distinguished itself as an industry leader in helping media companies add video and image search capabilities to their web properties, maximizing the amount of time people spend on their websites and offering the most engaging content discovery experience for readers of their sites.

MediaRiver recently launched ClickSurge as an innovative tool for web publishers to lead Internet users to online content in a discovery-based contextual model. Publishers deploy ClickSurge powered widgets on their web properties, their partner’s web properties, or as a part of their viral widget strategy, that feed the end user articles, videos or photos that are relevant to the page they are viewing. For example, a visitor who is reading an article or blog posting around a specific celebrity would be shown links to relevant articles, video clips and photos of that celebrity, prompting them to click through to other monetized web pages.

By incorporating ClickSurge powered widgets into its offerings, Pixsy will enable its publisher customers to display rich multimedia content that is contextually relevant to whatever text is on the page where the widget is deployed. The end result is a significant increase in page views for its customers and an increase in search volume and market share for Pixsy.

Under the terms of the agreement, Pixsy will deploy ClickSurge within its publisher network and leverage the solution to drive content syndication deals and extend the reach and effectiveness of its image and video search platform.

In addition, MediaRiver will leverage Pixsy’s award winning multimedia search engine to provide its customers who lack multimedia search capability with the ability to drive traffic to their monetized multimedia assets.

MediaRiver is a visionary company offering products that contextually and automatically publish content to any web page so that users can discover related content and publishers can drive users to the right content at the right time. The ClickSurge Platform enables Web publishers to guide Internet users to the publishers’ online content in a widget-based delivery model; allowing content of any type, including video, music, pictures or text, to be linked onto any web page dynamically based on the unique properties of that web page. For more information about MediaRiver and ClickSurge, please visit http://www.mediariver.com/.

Pixsy Corporation is an award-winning media search platform that powers private label image and video search engines for online websites and applications. Pixsy brings a new suite of tools to the multimedia search sector and is creating new search-based ad opportunities in the process. Pixsy’s multimedia spiders and index also let it create compelling vertical search applications for customers that can serve as multimedia launching points for vertical portals. Pixsy has offices in San Francisco, CA and Seattle, WA and was founded by a team of engineers and business leaders hailing from Microsoft, Sony, and ValueClick.

Scott Cleland, the Chairman of NETCompetition.org, urged the United States Congress today to continue to promote “free-market policies” to help build the next generation of the Internet. Mr.Cleland urged the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet to continue to institute policies that are designed to help expand high-speed broadband deployment. He also urged them to keep the Internet “unfettered” by Federal and State (local) regulations.

Mr. Cleland thinks that the future demands on Internet capacity from online video, gaming and YouTube, will require a “higher-capacity Internet”. He went on to say, in a press release today, that this new “higher-capacity Internet” will only develop if the United States Government allows the free market to continue to spur investment and innovation.

“The Internet is the greatest deregulation success of all time. As a result of free-market competition, broadband speeds, capacities and functionalities have increased dramatically and broadband companies have incentives to invest heavily to enable Internet video. Preemptive and unwarranted restrictive regulation, like ‘net neutrality,’ would destroy current market investment incentives to keep the Internet dynamic, fast and productive.” Cleland said.

NETCompetition.org is an e-forum to debate the merits of net neutrality. NETCompetition.org is funded by broadband telecom, cable and wireless companies who believe in free and open Internet competition, not net regulation. See www.netcompetition.org.