VentureBeat

A marriage between Silicon Valley and Hollywood talent led to the birth last month of a video start-up Funny or Die. What took YouTube to do in six months, Funny or Die did in six days.

Its traffic exploded after the release of its first 2-minute clip, The Landlord, starring Will Ferrell. The video drew almost 24 million views. This would be in YouTube’s top three of all time.

Last year, I wrote (“Forget the Long Tail!”) that it wouldn’t be the Long Tail that wins out in the video space, but big studio and middle market talent. The operative word is “talent.” As I argued a year ago, there are only so many stupid human tricks people can watch and the future of online video isn’t clips of TV shows or movies. Funny or Die highlights what happens when talented writers and actors combine to produce videos for the online environment. Audiences will flock to their content and sites versus the vast majority of long tail plays on YouTube.

What else does this mean for online video over the next few years?

The market will become divided into fiefdoms. YouTube already won the first battle, but the war will rage on as users move to video communities based on genre, such as Funny or Die, or affinity groups. If I’m into soccer and just wanted to see soccer videos, why would I go to YouTube if there were a site that was rich in soccer videos? Hmm… if I was CEO of a second-tier online video site, I would find a genre(s) to focus on, aggregate content from outside and homegrown sources, and hopefully create a fanatical following.

Video search becomes critical. Assuming a few years from now the world will not be dominated by YouTube and video fiefdoms dot the landscape, the importance of video search becomes critical. Lightweight video search engines that return results based on text metadata associated with the video won’t do. Robust engines that conduct advanced visual analysis are critical in this next stage of online video.

Moving to mobile. 2-minute clips online are great predecessors for quality content packaged for the mobile environment. When next-generation mobile networks, known as “ 3G” and “4G” are deployed and reach their critical mass, user behavior and demands will be ideal for the longer quality short-form videos. I could see clips of soap operas or dramas 5 minutes or longer, but who knows?

It’s going to be fun watching how all of this plays out. Maybe Will Ferrell will conquer the mobile space too?

Declaring it has “perfected the user experience” for audio and visual search, Seattle start-up Pluggd has raised $1.65 million from Intel and angel investors to help it start distributing its technology.

If you haven’t played with Pluggd, you should. It provides that “wow” experience, giving you what you intuitively want when searching video: a way to skip forward to the exact part of the audio or video file you are looking for. We’ll be hearing more about Pluggd next year, as it begins to cut partnership deals with major publishers, and comes out of the testing phase it launched two months ago.

Let’s take an example.

Take this ESPN radio recording from yesterday. Select the “find” tab, and type in the word “Marlins.” Pluggd will show you in the heat map the places most likely to be interesting to you. Orange shows a very high match. If you move the cursor there, you’ll hear the part about the Marlins. (You can do this by clicking on this image at left. You may be prompted to update your Flash player; go ahead and do so.)

But it gets even better.

Pluggd finds related words. Let’s say you’re looking for anything to do with injury, because you’d heard that Kobe Bryant might be injured. You type in “injury,” and Pluggd locates the part where the radio mentions his sprained ankle, even though the word “injury” is never mentioned in the audio. (Again, you can try this by clicking on image at left.)

This is impressive. Pluggd can do this by analyzing pages and pages of sports articles, and finding the statistical relationships between words. Its crawler finds that sprained ankle is very clearly correlated with the word injury over time. It does this without any sort of human domain experts. No one is doggedly typing in these associations behind the scenes. It is all automated, relying on the great database called the Web. “The Web itself represents mankind’s knowledge,” says Alexander Castro.

Right now, this cool search is only available at Pluggd’s demo site. And in case we’ve lost you, here’s a screencast tour.

Meanwhile, Pluggd has also building an inventory of ESPN and other files — now numbering more than a million — and it is busy indexing them all, so that it can make them available for crawling with its technology. Like Google, it wants to become a destination site. Also like Google, it wants to offer its technology to publishers, too, and Pluggd says it will be announcing various deals next year.

The company has boot-strapped itself until now, and the $1.65 million can be considered a seed round, to be converted into a first VC round sometime next year.

Intel made up a good portion of the investment, but more than half was contributed by a group of angels, including Scott Oki, former senior vice president for sales, marketing and service at Microsoft and Paul Maritz, former Microsoft group vice president of systems and applications. Other angels include:

–Brian Magierski, CEO of Kalivo, former co-founder/CEO of iMark (acquired by Ariba);
–Fraser Black, technology investor
–Bill Bryant, founder and investor in numerous search-focused startups including Netbot, Medio and Singingfish;
–Alex Alben, former executive at Starwave and RealNetworks;
–Barry Newman, venture partner at NeoCarta, former vice chairman of the technology group at Bear Stearns;
–Mark Klebanoff, former chief financial officer at RealNetworks.

There are a multitude of other companies focused on audio and video search (Pixsy, Podzinger and CastTV, for example), but none that are using Pluggd’s heat map approach that takes you directly to where you want to go.