Roo is an online video network that offers turnkey services to website publishers, content producers and advertisers to help them take advantage of the broadband video phenomenon.

Roo has completed a private equity financing with gross proceeds of $25 million, in a common stock transaction. The participants in the transaction are accredited institutional investors, the majority of which are existing investors which include media giant News Corp.

[Press Release]

ScanScout is another video ad-broker start-up promising to deliver relevant in-context advertising for online video broadcasters.

The company has just closed $7 million in its first round of institutional funding led by General Catalyst Partners with participation from existing angel investors, Ron Conway and First Round Capital.

[Press Release]

MetaCafe will be taking a similar approach to advertising as YouTube by inserting static text-based adverts within video clips on its website.

MetaCafe has partnered with Adap.tv to provide these adverts. Adap.tv is a new online video advertising platform that has just launched publically. The company allows publishers and advertisers to match relevant advertising with online video content.

Adap.tv’s partnership with MetaCafe is very substantial given that MetaCafe is one of the leading video sharing sites and has an estimated 20 million visitors a month.

Those of you living in the UK may have noticed that Virgin Media has recently taken over Blueyonder and is going on an all on assault to become the ultimate media provider in the UK.

Virgin has launched a quadplay package with internet, digital TV, broadband and mobile phone in one subscription, which includes access to virgin’s on-demand IPTV channel, Virgin Central.

Virgin is giving NewsCorp’s BSkyB, the leading TV subscription service in the UK, a good run for its money.

In fact Virgin placed a wasp so far up BSkyB’s ass that BSkyB pulled its Sky channels from the Virgin Media package.

Joost, the new internet TV platform from the makers of Skype and Kazaa, has secured a whopping $45 million dollars in financing from five selected parties.

Investors include CBS, Viacom, Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures. Press release follows:

In April CinemaNow president Bruce Eisen recently left the company to start his own consultancy firm, Digital Advisors. He was a co-founder of CinemaNow and had been with the online movie service for eight years.

Now just 1 month later after it was announced he was leaving CinmeaNow it has been announced that he will be joining video search engine, ClipBlast.

Eisen will manage business development help grow ClipBlast’s relationships with content providers, advertisers and technology companies. Press release follows…

Motorola is not a company that you may instantly associate with IPTV boxes, or set top boxes in general. If you asked the man on the street what Motorola does he would probably mention cell phones.

However Motorola has had a strong placement in the set top box (STB) market for some time. Last year it announced that it has shifted 50 million cable boxes.