Dailymotion announced today that Cedric Tournay has been named its new CEO. Tournay replaces Ian Brotherston, who had only held the post since April. Brotherston will stay on with the company but will move over to become executive vice president of international strategy.

MediaPost reports that Dailymotion always considered Brotherston’s appointment as CEO as an interim one, though that temporary status was not mentioned at the time. We dug up the April 21, 2009, press release announcing Brotherston as CEO, which didn’t say anything about his being interim:

Dailymotion names Ian Brotherston Chief Executive Officer

Paris – April 21st 2009 – Dailymotion’s Board of Directors has announced today that Ian Brotherston has been appointed to the role of Chief Executive Officer of Dailymotion…

“We are delighted to welcome Ian as new CEO. His strong management experience will help shape Dailymotion as we continue our growth and global expansion. Ian’s primary focus will be to lead Dailymotion in its next phase of development,” says Benoist Grossmann, partner at AGF Private Equity.

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After reading an informative post about the history of real-time search by guest author Mary Hodder on TechCrunch today, I was reminded to check on her social video search startup, Dabble. Founded in 2005, Dabble had undertaken the challenge of organizing the universe of web video with metadata and community-created playlists.

It appears that the site hasn’t been up in months — at least nine months, in fact, because I remember specifically talking to Hodder about it being down in October. None of the search and share functionality is available, with the whole of the site replaced by a note with the headline “Dabble is having a make-over.” The Internet Archive isn’t much help in pinpointing the date the note was put up; it hasn’t posted a fresh save of the site since February of 2008.

In October, Hodder told me that the site had to be taken offline due to problems with her hosting company and a lack of funding. Today via email Hodder said she’s still working on the technology behind the scenes, but without funding the site won’t be back up anytime soon.

Digitalsmiths, in an attempt to stand out from the far-too-many white-label video vendors out there, today launched an update to its video publishing platform that brings out the company’s roots in video search. The company now calls its platform “VideoSense” and its time-based metadata framework “MetaFrame.”

Research Triangle Park, N.C.-based Digitalsmiths, which powers video for many Time Warner sites including Warner Bros. and TMZ, has already shifted some of its customers to this new platform. CEO Ben Weinberger said the company has signed additional unannounced studios, and plans to build on its business of indexing and providing TV and online video by adding films.

VideoSense uses a combination of factors such as facial recognition, scene classification and object identification to associate any given aspect of a video with a time stamp. The platform also makes connections between aspects like actor names, locations and dialogue and the particular frame in which they occur. So visitors to a video site could use the search functionality to pinpoint their vaguely remembered television moments — say, a certain actor visiting a venue, or a character joking about a particular topic.

That kind of powerful search seems like it would be especially useful if applied on a web-wide video search engine rather than locked into single-studio content libraries. However, Digitalsmiths is firmly focused on its white-label video program rather than a consumer service.

Digitalsmiths raised a $12 million Series B funding last fall and said it added strategic funding from Cisco in January.

We haven’t written about Seesmic on NewTeeVee in a long time, and it sounds like this may well be the last time. The company is deemphasizing — though at this point not removing — its video conversation service in favor of supporting its social aggregation tool, Seesmic Desktop, and associated products. CenterNetworks had the news this morning after noticing that video was pushed way down to the bottom of Seesmic’s site in a redesign.

Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur posted a video on his site (at least he still uses the service!) saying that the video community was not growing and he needed to direct his company towards something more promising. He asserted that competitors like 12seconds are not seeing growth, either. It can only be a matter of time before San Francisco-based Seesmic shuts down video entirely.

Seesmic’s video service enabled users to post public threaded asynchronous video comments on its own site and in the comments sections of participating sites. At times the company had experimented with producing original shows and hosting chat sessions with famous people, but those petered out. We can’t think of a video service offering an exact alternative with the same global and public emphases, but quick-upload video from phones and webcams is definitely growing on larger sites like YouTube and Facebook.

Seesmic had raised significant funding — $12 million — but has also made multiple rounds of layoffs.