From the 11/24/2010 VentureWire:
Both Digitalsmiths Corp. and Gotuit Media Corp. have patented technologies that make it easier to find, index and manage large libraries of video content, a problem that’s been growing as more people use the Internet to watch video. Now they’re going to team up, as Digitalsmiths has acquired Gotuit.
Both companies are venture-backed. Digitalsmiths, based in Research Triangle Park, N.C., raised $18 million in two rounds from Aurora Funds, Chrysalis Ventures, .406 Ventures and Cisco Systems, according to VentureWire archives, while Gotuit, based in Woburn, Mass., is backed by Atlas Venture, Highland Capital Partners and the Topol Group, among others. Gotuit’s funding amount could not be confirmed.
Digitalsmiths Director Wright Steenrod, who’s a principal at Chrysalis Ventures, would not reveal the terms of the acquisition, but he said that Gotuit shareholders are now Digitalsmiths shareholders. The deal closed this week.
“We’re bringing together two leading companies around millisecond-by-millisecond indexing of video content…so you can search content we’ve indexed by actor, scene and language to produce a frame-by-frame index of that content and also index from what’s coming live off the broadcast,” Steenrod said. “If Google or Bing were confined to searching by blog title posts and magazine article titles, you would find their search a lot less fulfilling. We aim to bring that level of context to video.”
Digitalsmiths does have competitors, Steenrod said, but the combined companies have more than 35 patents and can create frame-by-frame video metadata. Both companies also have large media customers — Digitalsmiths’ include Paramount, Warner Brothers and ESPN.
Gotuit CEO Mark Pascarella, who joined Gotuit in 2001, will sit on Digitalsmiths’ advisory board, while Digitalsmiths CEO Ben Weinberger will head the combined company from Digitalsmiths’ North Carolina headquarters, Steenrod said.
In 2008, Digitalsmiths was named one of Dow Jones Top 45 Companies to Watch.