Google to sell Web video ads with Brightcove

February 21, 2008 01:46 PM E-mail| |Comments ()| Text size – +

Google Inc. plans to start selling ads to appear in Web videos and has signed up 20 customers, as it aims to do for videos what it has done for text.

Partners include Cambridge-based Brightcove, an Internet TV platform, the comedy site MyDamnChannel, and YuMe, an online video advertising network.

Brightcove, whose customers include CBS Corp., Time Warner Inc., and Discovery Communications Inc., will begin offering the technology to its clients.

YuMe, a Redwood City, Calif., start-up, said it will serve InVideo overlay advertisements as part of Google’s AdSense advertising program.

Google has traditionally used AdSense for text-only ads.

Google has been working on ways of developing advertising revenue for online video since it bought YouTube, the video-sharing site, in November 2006.

As Internet access speeds become faster around the world, more television and Hollywood-produced video content is moving to the Web on sites like Hulu.com, owned by News Corp. and NBC Universal, and Fancast.com, owned by Comcast Corp.
(Reuters)