• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, November 23, 2010

Signaling further industry consolidation, white-label video technology company Digitalsmiths on Tuesday announced the acquisition of metadata technology provider Gotuit Media. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

"By combining our ability to scale libraries of content and Gotuit's broadcast capabilities, we've created the most comprehensive solution for video indexing and metadata monetization available," said Ben Weinberger, CEO of Digitalsmiths.

Founded in 2000, Gotuit's Video Metadata Management System bills itself as an end-to-end system that aids in the presentation, discovery, advertising, and profitability of publishers' video libraries.

The acquisition brings together technologies for automation and human authoring of metadata, and gives Digitalsmiths control of a broad intellectual property portfolio in the video metadata space.

The company's portfolio now consists of more than 35 patents covering core metadata creation, aggregation and application, among others.

Mark Pascarella, CEO of Gotuit, is expected to remain involved in the combined company during the transition, and will sit on the Digitalsmiths advisory board.

Digitalsmiths' clients include Warner Bros., Telepictures and TMZ.com.

Late last year, Digitalsmiths launched a suite of services for entitlement rights management, time-based metadata management, dynamic clip creation and distribution, ad cue management, and multi-language support.

Named VideoSense for TV Everywhere, the product suite is designed to make the lives of premium content owners easier with a systematic, automated platform that lets them deliver the right content to the right users in the right distribution windows.

Digitalsmiths 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.

However, Time Warner's hugely popular and video-heavy celebrity gossip site TMZ dropped Brightcove for Digitalsmiths last year.

Digitalsmiths investors include .406 Ventures, Chrysalis Ventures, The Aurora Fund and Cisco Systems.