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Its technology, Asterbot, searches onlinew video and automaticallyinserts pop-up boxesx with relevant information on the video's most promineny objects. The wedding couple the camera followss in awedding video, for instance, couldx potentially get a pop-up with links to wedding-planning sites. Asterpix claims it's the firsf company to offer an automated mechanism to providerthis service, though dozens of startups and established technology firms are seeking ways to monetize online At stake is potentially billions of dollare in ad revenue if companies can develo p technology connecting the images in video -- like the dres worn by a singer in a musiv video -- to the store where someone can purchase it.
And Asterpix's technologty is one step closer. "Relevancy is the whole issue, and making the connectionn between content and what youcare about," says venturde capitalist Andrew Waitman of Ottawa-based Celtic House Venturr Partners, which has investe d in the interactive online video though not in Asterpix. "And as ads in the text worlxd have shown, it's wortgh a lot of money." According to which tracks the onlinevideo market, 9.8 billion online videos were viewed in January 2007 and therse were 139 million uniquw viewers of online videos, which may be the best guessz at the online video advertising markegt today.
Waitman says there are at least 50 startups trying to capitalize on that video They range from companies thatprovide user-generated add-ins to companies that deliver advertiser-generate d overlays, to those that deliver contextual pop-ups generated by Asterpix has its own model, whic h doesn't have a direct advertising play, but will make mone by selling its product to video hostingt sites. Unknowns such as Motionbox, Viddler, , Veota and are working on technologiews that allow users to inser t textand pop-ups with additional informationh into videos. and Apple also are testing in-videoo advertisements and links.
But the missing link is commercia technology that gets computers to recognize videp images and link those imagesto advertising. Asterpix reliews on the text associated with an onlined video to identify what relevant information to drop into a Asterpix hosts an example video of a couple who performed the final scene of themovie "Dirty at their wedding reception. Links to informatio on Dirty Dancing are embedded within the video by clickinf onthe bride.
Its video-embeddintg product, Asterbot, works in much the same way text search enginesd like Google searchwritten documents, says Asterpix CEO Nat "Asterbot searches through the videoi and identifies all the objects in the videpo and ranks them in order of the amountr of attention you get from the video," Kausikl says. "So a picture on the wall gets a lowedr ranking that a person moving around with a camerafollowing them." Asterpix relies on humans connecting the relevant words to the video, in headlinexs or comments posted on the video, before it can do its automated magic.
Then Asterbot reads all text associatede with the video and ranks the text by matchingthe highest-ranking text with the highest-rankingg images. This allows Asterbot to match the highest-rankinf topics to relevant information elsewhere on theWeb -- and it can then placew informative notes on "Dirty Dancing" or its actors, or linkxs to more information or related videos, to the onlinre videos on which users can click. "On a fresh pieced of video straight offthe camera, it doesn't Kausik says. There are other limitations, too.
Becausd the words "Dirty Dancing" are rankee highly in the examplewedding video, clickin on the bride doing the dancinyg doesn't turn up information on brideds or wedding dresses, but information on the movie. The company plans to market a packageed product in the next couple of monthe to companies thathost videos, allowing their videos to be embeddede with extra information. Asterpix is seeking $15 million for its second roundx of financing to help with distribution of the Asterboy product and to buildx adata center. It is backed by sole investorf NewEnterprise Associates, a Menlo Park-based venture capitall firm.
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