Now ClipSyndicate is spreading its API to video search sites like AOL’s Truveo and other services like Magnify (which we reported earlier) and Lingospot. For instance, ClipSyndicate videos come up in regular video searches in Truveo and play in an embedded ClipSyndicate player. On this Magnify page for Barack Obama, the “Obama News” videos come from ClipSyndicate. And Lingospot, which creates an in-text search bubble when you mouse over a linked term (see left), can show ClipSyndicate videos in its bubbles. You can even find ClipSyndicate videos on Bebo, although you have to look hard and there is no official deal yet with the social networking site.

To get a sense of the entertainment value of some of this stuff, here is a news clip from a local Oregon station about a man with blue skin who is moving to California in search of more tolerant neighbors:

http://xml.truveo.com/eb/i/3421598497/a/4c86ff7dda1f7b769d520f50a4658f1d/p/1

ClipSyndicate serves ads with the videos and splits the proceeds as follows: 30 percent to the content producer (i.e., the local TV station), 20 percent to the API partner or Website where the video is seen, and 50 percent for itself. (Although the beta and APIs are available by invite only, the company plans to open up participation to all comers by the end of the first quarter). Critical Media CEO Sean Morgan tells me that he is getting $50 CPMs on the video ads sold through his salesforce compared to $8 to $12 CPMs from backfill video ad networks because the videos tend to appear on extremely targeted sites. Think Yummy Chummy ads on PetsHealthFocus. His sweet spots are mortgage, pets and animals, and health sites. He also claims that he is seeing close to three percent click-throughs on his graphical banner ads compared to quarter-point click-throughs on run-of-network ads.

What he is excited about, though, is marrying the brand advertising of video with the specificity of search. Truveo, for instance, passes the search terms through the API, so that can inform what types of ads are shown, in addition to the actual content of the video. As ClipSyndicate’s business model develops, we’ll see if it is actually possible to make money from the long tail of video (although note that this is still professional-quality video, and much higher up the curve than most of the audience-generated video on the Web).

Clavier, who has a degree in computer science, has been actively investing in startups over the last few years and has had notable successes such as Truveo (acquired by AOL for a rumored $50 million), Userplane (acquired by AOL for a rumored $35 million), MyBlogLog (acquired by Yahoo for $10 million), Kaboodle (acquired by Hearst for a rumored $30-40 million), Mayas Mom (acquired by BabyCenter for $7 million), Dogster, Kongregate, Edgeio and many others. In other words, he has an eye for winners. His investment philosophy will remain much the same, he says. He’s just now investing money from limited partners as well as his own capital.

He says he’ll invest the fund in a total of 30 to 40 seed stage startups with investments ranging from $100k – $500k. SoftTech VC will focus on consumer Internet.

Clavier has made four initial investments through the fund: Satisfaction Unlimited, Social Media Network, Grouply (which will launch at the conference today) and Active Athlete.

The traffic figures support this. Comscore reports that the site has 40 million monthly unique visitors and is growing at about a 50%/month rate.

Truveo says this is a combination of their approach to search as well as the fact that copyright holders are becoming more diligent about pulling down unauthorized uploads on YouTube and other sites. The result is that YouTube is no longer the single place to find good video clips. People are turning to search to find Daily Show clips on the Comedy Central website, for example, instead of just looking for them on Youtube.

The company is also partnering outside of AOL to get broader distribution for the engine. Brightcove, Clevver, CSTV, Flock, Pageflakes, PureVideo, Qwest, Search.com, Sportingo, Netvibes, Widgetbox and YourMinis all now use Truveo for video search, joining existing partners AOL Video, AOL Search, Excite, Infospace.

There’s a new kid on the block, though, called CastTV, which recently announced a $3.1 million Series A round of financing from Draper Fisher Jurvetson. They haven’t launched yet, but the results from demos show it to be as good or better than Truveo. Given that AOL already owns Truveo, look for a quick acquisition of CastTV, probably by Google, if the technology is as good as the demos suggest.

Now they are preparing to launch their second company, CastTV. It is an ambitious effort focused entirely on video search. And that’s not a bad place to be. As we’ve recently written, rich media search is a very hard problem to solve.

A notable success in video search is Truveo, which launched in 2005 and was acquired by AOL in early 2006 for an estimated $50 million or more. Truveo had a unique way of searching video content. First, finding video can be hard, and Truveo does a good job of locating video on indexed web pages. Second, Truveo looks at text surrounding video links, as well as metadata included in the video file itself, and makes intelligent assumptions about the video.

CastTV is taking many of the successes of Truveo and building on them. Search itself is significantly better than any other video search we’ve seen, and the user interface, which includes really smart filters (more on that below), makes it easier to find what you’re looking for, fast.

Edwin and Alex won’t disclose all of the technology behind the service, but part of the trick is that they are able to track videos through multiple links on a site, collecting metadata along the way. And they also parse the code on the video files as well, gathering additional information about the content. If tags are available for the videos (such as YouTube tags), these are indexed as well. The final step is actually even more interesting – CastTV will take the data they are able to collect about a video and search the web in general for additional data. If there’s a close enough match, CastTV adds that information to the content metadata. And unlike other video search tools, CastTV indexes movies and shows from iTunes and other for-pay services.

All of this doesn’t mean much unless the search performs well. In tests I was able to find full versions of movies and tv shows that simply didn’t show up in Yahoo, Google or Truveo search. A free episode of 24 at a Myspace Burger King page. Full versions of Pirates of the Caribbean 2 with price comparisons ($14.99 at CinemaNow, $9.99 at iTunes), as well as available formats (WMV and Quicktime). Searches for trailers, movie and show clips, and user generated stuff all yielded equally impressive results.

Results can be sorted by shows (to weed out non-relevant stuff), host (such as itunes, CBS Innertube, etc to focus on a favorite service provider), by date, relevance, prices, etc.

Look for CastTV to launch sometime in the Fall, and in my opinion be acquired shortly thereafter. In the meantime you can sign up on their home page to be emailed when they launch. If you’d like to see founder Alex Vikati demo the product in person, make sure to attend Jeff Clavier’s Search SIG event next week in Silicon Valley. She’ll be there, along with other hot video startups.

Additional screen shots below.

Truveo has an innovative way for quickly indexing media content such as audio and video, and figuring out what it is even if there is little or no meta data associated with it. It is an incredibly useful technology and search engine.

I like Truveo, which launched in September, because it relies on a core hard-to-duplicate technology rather than a business plan which creates a network effect. The only other web 2.0 company that I can think of off the top of my head that is similar is Riya, which is also building some very tricky stuff. This doesn’t mean I don’t like network-effect companies. To the contrary, I love them. But if you can build something that is protectable on the IP side as well, then you may just have a large liquidity event, too.

Jeff Clavier is an advisory to Truveo and wrote about the acquitision today as well. I’ve gotten to know Jeff quite a bit over the last few months. I am not saying he is fully or even mostly responsible for this acquisition (I have no idea), but I do think that he adds a lot of value to his clients and his “stamp of approval” is becoming a seriously valuable asset. If you are luck enough to work with him, your chances of success increase dramatically.

Truveo is a video search engine that beta-launched a few days ago. Jeff Clavier, an investor, writes about Truveo here.

If you are looking for video content, this is the place to go.

Founded two years ago by a seriously smart team of search experts, Truveo is tackling the very difficult problem of creating metadata from video out of whole cloth – unlike text-based content, it is very difficult to determine context of video and audio content without a human to actually view it (which is error prone and doesn’t scale).

Truveo takes an innvoative two step approach to indexing new content. The first step is a straight web crawl to find the videos. The second, more important step, is to create metadata about the content, beyond what is available in transcripts and feeds (most video content has neither). They’ve created a “visual crawler” that looks at surrounding content to determine context.

Finding all the video files on the web is only part of the challenge. For video to be searchable, it is also necessary to collect meaningful text metadata to associate with each video file. Of course, we rely on standard techniques, such as mining closed-caption transcripts and importing RSS feeds. The vast majority of video on the web, however, does not have any closed-caption or RSS metadata available. Fortunately, our visual crawlers come to the rescue. Whenever our visual crawlers find a new video on the web, they can also “visually” examine the context of the surrounding web application. In most cases, this examination reveals a bounty of rich and detailed metadata related to every video.

With our unique approach to crawling, not only can we find the videos that the other crawlers miss, but we can also collect rich and relevant metadata for each video. As a result, when you search for video with Truveo, you can always find high-quality, relevant search results. The next time you are looking for a web video to watch, we invite you to try our search engine and see for yourself.

The best thing is, this stuff actually works. Try searches for Hurricane Rita and Daily Show.

There are advanced search options and preferences that will assist users in finding relevant content. Sadly, the “adult filter” is turned on by default. You can also filter out paid content.

The only thing I’d like to see added is RSS feeds for search.

Team

Dr. Timothy Tuttle – CEO & Founder
Dr. Adam Beguelin – CTO & Founder
Dr. Pete Kocks – Senior Architect
Link