Research Triangle Park, N.C-based Digitalsmiths has closed a $12 million Series B round of funding to extend its video indexing and ad targeting technology platform. The money comes from existing investors The Aurora Funds and Chrysalis Ventures; .406 Ventures also participated.
Digitalsmiths has been indexing digital content in videos (both visual and audio) for Hollywood studios for the past three years and recently started providing its technology for web-based video platforms. The idea behind it is that content owners and publishers can monetize their digital video content more efficiently, while advertisers could potentially target ads to thematically relevant video content automatically.
The company first appeared on our radar when Warner Bros. announced it was using Digitalsmiths’ technology for enabling visitors of TheWB.com to search through their video clip archive by what the characters in scenes are saying (you can see our introduction to the new features here). A similar solution has been made available to another Time Warner property, TMZ, which notably pushed out competing video platform Brightcove in favor of Digitalsmiths.
Auditude (see previous coverage) and Viewdle are also players in this space, offering intelligent audio/video content detection.