• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, December 15, 2009

Paramount Digital Entertainment has tapped white-label video technology company Digitalsmiths to launch an online content hub exclusively for enterprise use.

ParamountClips.com represents the first offering from the studio's digital film index, and presently features clips from over 80 of Paramount's most popular films.

The idea is simply to open new revenue stream, according to Geremie Camara, VP of product development for Paramount Digital Entertainment.

"This new platform enables Paramount to create a 'digital blueprint' of our entire film library that can be monetized across an unlimited combination of screens, interactive applications, strategic initiatives and business relationships worldwide," Camara said.

Paramount licensees can search for any element within the library by specific actor, location or line of dialogue. Digitalsmiths' VideoSense product combs through the collected metadata to locate the relevant clip, which can then be reformatted, exported to a video platform, and monetized.

For the project, Digitalsmiths applied proprietary video interpretation technologies such as facial recognition, scene classification and closed-captioned time alignment to HD copies of films from the Paramount library.

Based in Raleigh-Durham, N.C., Digitalsmiths provides publishers with video indexing and ad-targeting technology bundled with a white-label video service.

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 -- which both helped the startup raise $6 million last year.

For the launch, Paramount relied on a suite of services that Digitalsmiths debuted in October, which facilitate entitlement rights management, time-based metadata management, clip creation and distribution, and ad cue management.