CastTV Takes $3.1M for Video Search

Video search startup CastTV announced Tuesday it had received $3.1 million in financing with a Series A round led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and including familiar Silicon Valley investors Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway. The pre-launch company also said something fuzzy about a “major media corporation” it had already signed to use its search tools.

We’re surprised to see yet another company get funded in such a crowded space, but that’s not to say video search has been solved yet. CastTV claims its edge is a better ability to index video tied up in Flash, JavaScript, and media player plug-ins, as well as its incorporation of behavioral data. We’re planning to talk to the company and possibly DFJ this morning, so expect this post to be updated more details added below the fold.

The San Francisco-based company says Stanford computer science professor Rajeev Motwani is a technical advisor (not an investor, as we originally stated).

I just spoke with Alex Vikati, co-founder and president of CastTV, who explained the startup was founded in 2004 after she and her husband Edwin Ong left Oracle (which had purchased their previous company, FileFish, in 2003). The two of them had been building the CastTV product mostly on their own until closing the funding round last month. Now they plan to build a team of 15 to 20 by the end of the year.

Vikati claimed CastTV’s video-specific crawler will hunt out more video than anyone else, asserting the video search space is “wide open” while competition like Google is focusing on hosting video, Yahoo on its “brand universe” initiative, and other startups like blinkx on bringing down feeds from video hosts rather than crawling the open web.

Responding to Eric Elia’s comment, she asserted that Truveo has trouble detecting Flash episodes of network shows such as Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives on abc.com. She also said she thought Truveo overemphasized its parent AOL’s content.

In my own searches I was able to find some abc.com content on AOL/Truveo’s SearchVideo engine. I wasn’t able to compare CastTV’s results because it’s not even in private beta yet. I also reached out to Truveo head Tim Tuttle for comment and will post his reply, should he send one.

Update: Tuttle replies, via email: “CastTV seems to be squarely focused on the right problem — finding video and metadata hidden behind Flash, JavaScript and media player plug ins… We have been developing this technology, which we call ‘visual crawling’, since 2004. It has given us a significant leg up on other video search engines. It sounds like CastTV might be some new competition in this area. I know how hard this problem is to solve, and I am curious to see how well their solution works.”

CastTV is planning a private beta launch in May followed by a full launch this summer.