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Scanscout, an online video advertising company, has raised an undisclosed amount from Time Warner — yet another large, old media company investing in a video startup.

The Boston, Mass. company is part of a new crop of startups seeking to help advertisers to place their ads contextually within videos (screenshot of company demo, below).

Scanscout competes most directly with other startups like Adap.tv and EveryZing, two other recently-funded startups that claim to have market-leading technology for placing contextual advertising in videos.

Scanscout displays “in-line” advertising that appears as a banner at the bottom of a video as a user watches it. If a user clicks on the ad, they’ll be taken to another page with more information from the advertiser. Scanscout tracks visual and audio patterns in a video, as well as relevant information on the web page, to calculate the most relevant advertising. So if you’re on a soccer fan site watching a World Cup highlight video with an announcing shouting “gol” every ten seconds, chances are you’d see an ad button for say, a movie about soccer.

Adapt.tv, which raised $10 million in July, uses similar measurements to calculate which ads to place with which videos. It also tracks which kinds of ads users are clicking on the most to serve up more of those kind of ads.

EveryZing, which raised $10 million in June, uses a somewhat different method: It creates transcripts of audio speech in a video, then searches this text to figure out where context fits best.

Online video companies of all sizes are working on similar problems. Videoegg, a provider of a broad range of video advertising services and which raised $15 million last week, also offers such in-line ad services.

YouTube, the clear market leader in online video, beginning to experiment with its own in-line ads.

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.

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.