Bryson will be responsible for corporate development, strategic partnerships, developing customer relationships, and -- as he put it -- "accelerating the digital media audience reach of our customers."

Before joining Digitalsmiths, Bryson served as senior vice president of sales and business development at Move Networks, where he led all sales and business development as well as the commercial deals and strategic relationships with the likes of Disney Media Networks, Disney ABC Television Group, ESPN Media Networks, Fox Interactive Media and MySpace.

The company also appointed Melissa Sargeant as vice president of marketing. She will lead the marketing and media efforts for Digitalsmiths. She previously served as a director of product marketing for software management company CA, Inc. (formerly Computer Associates).

Based in Raleigh-Durham, N.C., Digitalsmiths provides publishers with video indexing and ad-targeting technology bundled with a white-label video service. "Digitalsmiths has built the right technologies to power its digital video integrated services platform," according to Bryson.

The company faces stiff competition from a long list of video platform and indexing providers, including Brightcove, blinkx, thePlatform, Ooyala and Fliqz.

Brightcove, in particular, appears to be dominating the industry--having recently signed a number of top publishers, including Time Warner's AOL, The New York Times Co.'s NYTimes.com, and 16 Condé Nast Web properties. Overall, Brightcove is now the online video platform of choice for 93 magazines across 21 publishing families.

However, Time Warner's hugely popular and video-heavy celebrity gossip site TMZ recently dropped Brightcove for Digitalsmiths. The startup also previously reached a deal to power Time Warner's TheWB.com.

Late last year, the company closed a second round of financing worth $12 million. The round was led by .406 Ventures, and included existing investors The Aurora Funds and Chrysalis Ventures -- the two of which helped the startup raise $6 million last year.

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