In May we covered the launch of Adap.tv, a new company that has developed a technology to insert overly ads onto streaming video clips.  It’s akin to the banners you see running at the bottom of a news or sports TV program — although the ads don’t stay in place throughout the entire clip. An example is below.

These overlays are not intrusive and they provide a hyplerlink where users can click onto a sponsor and then come back to the clip.  Adap.TV has begun inserting these units on some clips on Metacafe and will be making more announcements soon, we are told.

Overlay ads aren’t exactly new, VideoEgg has provided them for a while. There have been reports that YouTube is going to implement overlay ads.   

Well, Adap.TV recently raised a venture round of $10 million and is scaling quickly.

The company shares revenue on the basis of the yield of the ads, and the revenue split is 70/30.  Adap.TV VP Sean Behr stopped by the Beet.TV worldwide broadcast center to fill us in.

The thing that I am jazz about is the ability of "narrowcasters’ or video bloggers like Beet.TV to employ Adap.TV as a means to monetize our content. 

Right now, we use video streaming services including Blip.TV, YouTube and Google Video to create and distribute our files.  If these video sharing sites employ Adap.TV, then we can use it. 

However,  when we create our own Flash player, encode and distribute our files, like many smaller companies and institutions are beginning to do, we could employ Adap.TV’s platform.  We could use ads from the Adap.TV network or have the company insert ads we sell.  This is very promising.

Adaptv

— Andy Plesser

Grab the embed code of this interview with Sean.

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