CastTV, a start-up based in San Francisco, secured $3.1 million in Series A financing for its work developing video search technology.
The company said its video search technology has been developed over the last few years to address the challenges particular to online video search, which are twofold:
- Online videos are increasingly hidden in the “media Web” — behind Flash, JavaScript and media player plug-ins — and therefore hidden from traditional search engines. CastTV has built unmatched proprietary technology that crawls, indexes and extracts metadata from these videos.
- Metadata associated with videos is often short, incomplete and disorganized. CastTV has developed novel search algorithms that overcome these limitations by incorporating behavioral and extended data.
CastTV also revealed today that it has signed a two-year deal with a major media corporation to provide online video crawling and indexing technology for the company’s online video search offering. The funding and customer agreement validate CastTV’s technology solution and will accelerate the company’s growth and product development.
The funding was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson. CastTV has named Warren Packard, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, to its Board of Directors. Packard joins Internet pioneer Marc Andreessen, legendary angel investor Ron Conway and Stanford professor of computer science and director of graduate studies Rajeev Motwani, as Silicon Valley veterans behind CastTV. Andreessen was the co-founder of Netscape and co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser. Both Conway and Motwani played important roles in the development of Web search — Conway as an early investor in Google and Motwani as Google’s strategic advisor.
http://www.casttv.com