Technicolor Leads $12.5M Round In Video Search Provider Digitalsmiths
Company Plans to Ramp Up Sales With Third Round of Funding
By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 4/27/2011 1:15:00 AM
Digitalsmiths, a provider of video search and discovery technologies, announced $12.5 million in funding led by Technicolor that it plans to use to staff up on the sales side.
The third round of funding brings Digitalsmiths to $30 million total raised to date. All existing investors including Cisco Systems, .406 Ventures, Aurora Funds, Chrysalis Ventures and Capitol Broadcasting participated in the financing.
"Ramping the sales side is by far the main focus for this round," Digitalsmiths CEO and co-founder Ben Weinberger said in an interview.
Digitalsmiths' indexing system can automatically extract metadata from video and bookmark specific scenes in a video segment for later playback, and provide advanced search functions based on different criteria.
Weinberger sees an opportunity for Digitalsmiths to sell its technology to programmers for use on their own Web services and to pay-TV operators, to embed in their on-screen guides to aid search and discovery. "Everything we are doing now is connecting people to content in the most relevant way possible," he said.
While other vendors such as Blinkx provide video-search capabilities, Weinberger said Digitalsmiths' biggest competition is with media companies' own in-house development.
Regarding the Technicolor investment, Weinberger said Digitalsmiths has a "commercial agreement" with Technicolor but he declined to elaborate.
Digitalsmiths, founded in 1998, has about 60 employees and about 30 outside contractors. The company is based in Durham, N.C., with offices in Boston and Los Angeles.
Digitalsmiths' existing customers include Turner Sports, Warner Bros., The CW Network, Paramount, Fox, ESPN and the NBA. It owns 35 patents, 21 of which came from its acquisition of Gotuit Media last November.
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