VentureBeat

Adap.tv, a San Mateo, Calif. company that provides ads for online videos, has raised $10 million — as a slew of competitors, including Google, try to do the same.

The company’s technology provides contextually relevant advertising that runs at the bottom of a video as it plays (our early coverage here). This is sometimes called in-line ads, which are distinct from many other video-ad providers that include ads that take over the video player before, during or after the video has finished playing.

An Adap.tv example is a video featuring Brazilian soccer star Ronaldo, below. It includes ads that feature a book about Ronaldo’s life story on sale at Overstock.com. If you click on the ad, you’ll be taken to the Overstock sale page.

Adap.tv is going head-to-head with a number of other video-ad providers — including Scanscout, which raised $7 million in May, and EveryZing, a video-search company also working on similar technology, that raised $10 million in June.

Adap.tv’s investors highlighted its newly-formed business partnerships as important advantages in the race to monetize online video. One is with MetaCafe, an online video-sharing site, which is currently running Adap.tv’s ads (as seen in the Ronaldo example above). Another is with Comcast’s ThePlatform, a video service provider for other media organizations, which has recently begun providing Adap.tv’s services to its clients.

Google’s YouTube is also experimenting with in-line ads, although it has yet to provide details about it publicly.

Another interesting company trying to monetize videos is BroadRamp. Its core business is in content delivery. But it is also trying to highlight valuable products such as trucks or purses that appear in a video, then alerts the viewer to which items can be purchased (such as a truck that an actor is driving). The user then clicks in the item, adding it to a shopping cart. At the end of the video, the viewer can make credit-card purchases through the shopping cart.

Gemini Israel Funds made an earlier investment in the company, and was joined in this latest round by Redpoint Ventures.

Pluggd, a Seattle company, has delivered a widget that lets you search audio (and soon, video) on third-party sites in more sophisticated ways.

It has been working away on a technology that allows you to search for specific terms or themes within audio. We wrote about the company six months ago, when it launched a few test audio files to search.

The service debuts on CNET. Pluggd is signing up other partners too. Notably, the service is not free (Pluggd is negotiating prices with partners).

You can try it out over at CNET’s property ZDnet.

Go here for example, and try a search for iPhone — Pluggd will give you a heat map showing all the places in the audio file where iPhone is mentioned or even themes related to the iPhone are discussed.

The company has focused on audio files for now, but will be moving to video shortly, Pluggd’s chief marketing officer Cornelius Willis tells us.

Other companies offer competing technology, but none distribute the same heat-map precision features. There’s Everyzing, which offers similar search feature at its own site, and which is gearing up to deliver to more third-party sites. That company just raised lots $10 million to do so.

We’re hearing that Pluggd, meanwhile, is about to raise a significant round of capital too. The company would not comment.

Cambridge, Mass-based PodZinger, previously branded as a search engine for podcasts, has re-named itself EveryZing, and raised $10 million to expand its services.

EveryZing has a video and audio search engine for consumers, which we’ve covered before, but CEO Tom Wilde says that the company is using the money to change focus: EveryZing will use its speech-to-text technology to help publishers get their content into major search engines’ results and get related advertising.

Wilde claims that this technology, developed by military contractor and EveryZing’s original parent company, BBN (EveryZing has since spun off), is 85-90% accurate and has the capability to extract the meaning of a video’s content in ways that competitors like Adap.tv and Scanscout’s cannot. Specifically, he says, EveryZing has better speech recognition and natural language processing capabilities (We looked at Adap.tv and mentioned Scanscout here.)

EveryZing’s technology seeks to extract key terms from the transcripts it creates and auto-tag the content, making it searchable by Google and other search engines. Video search engine blinkx has similar capabilities, but confines usage to its site.

The other aspect of EveryZing’s new strategy is aimed at enabling contextual advertising in audio and video content. Large media producers find it difficult to mine their content for context, which hampers their ability to target ads. On top of this, advertisers don’t want to pitch their products next to objectionable content. EveryZing says its ability to create transcripts and determine their themes can solve these problems.

Getting computers to create accurate transcripts from video and then determine the meaning within them are terrifically hard problems, and EveryZing’s technology produces mixed results. For example: In a breakdown of a complicated TED talk from the author, Robert Wright, in which Wright asks whether or not biological and cultural evolution have direction and purpose, the transcript was impressively accurate — not perfect, but roughly in line with Wilde’s 85-90 percent accuracy claim. EveryZing’s thematic analysis also managed to determine that “biological evolution” was a key term. However, it decided that “histamine,” was a key term, as well. (See screenshot below) If you’re using a contextual advertising technology that relies on these key terms, you might take issue with EveryZing’s judgment.

That being said, it might be a little while before machines can scan transcripts and understand them, so early on, “good enough,” might have to do, even if that means a few ads for Benedryl or Claritin-D show up in a video about the meaning of life.

Fairhaven Capital led the round, with Accel and, strangely, General Catalyst — which invested in EveryZing competitor, Scanscout — participating as well. The company has now raised $15 million in total.