While Simon & Schuster has placed particular emphasis on online video, other publishers are also using it as a promotional tool. Reading community site Goodreads has its own video section, and website Book Riot has a separate section for book trailers. Readers and fans have come to expect “readily available and entertaining information both about their favorite authors and those they’re considering reading,” said Simon & Schuster EVP and chief digital officer Ellie Hirschhorn. “Video is now a critical part of that mix.”

Since many web users search for topics, not individual titles, Simon & Schuster has created three video channels that will appear on Roku and Blinkx. Two of the channels, “Tips on Healthy Living” and “Tips on Life and Love,” focus on videos from lifestyle and relationship authors (and have corresponding blogs), while “Book Stew” features author interviews for pop culture and general interest books.

Hirschhorn said Simon & Schuster’s most popular videos have been Walter Isaacson speaking on his book Steve Jobs (13,562 views on YouTube) and a book trailer for Hunger Games parody The Hunger Pains (over 1.5 million views on YouTube). The most successful videos, she said, provide “entertainment that is not an advertisement,” and tend to be under two minutes long.

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The app has four categories to browse through: Sports, News, Popular and Fun, all of which draw from Blinkx’s premium content partners. While the company started as just a video search engine, over the past few years, Blinkx has shifted its business model to also offer an ad network to publishers. The company claims more than 720 content partners and an index of more than 35 million hours of video and audio content. While those partners were featured on Blinkx’s site, as well as having ads delivered into videos on their own properties, Blinkx is now extending their reach to other devices.

Roku isn’t the first device partner to get a Blinkx app; the company introduced an application for Boxee earlier this year, and is providing video search, recommendation and personalization features on Amino set-top boxes. To accelerate adoption on TVs and other devices, it has also made a connected TV API available that will allow other CE manufacturers to quickly introduce apps that include Blinkx content partners.

For Blinkx, the addition of connected device distribution will enable it to serve up video — and more importantly, ads — to a highly engaged audience in the living room. As more viewers begin watching over-the-top video on those devices, that could help boost revenues for companies like Blinkx. Already, it saw its top-line sales nearly double in its fiscal year 2011 earnings report, and with the acquisition of Burst Media announced last month, that growth could accelerate even more.

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Blinkx hopes to create more value for both companies by embedding video and accompanying higher-CPM video ads through Burst Media’s roster of publisher sites. Burst reaches approximately 61 percent of the U.S. online population and is ranked as the 36th largest media property here. But it only gets an average CPM of around $1.49, compared to the $20 CPMs that Blinkx gets for non-targeted video ads its serves. Because of that, Blinkx sees an opportunity to not only expand the reach of its videos, but to drive higher CPMs through Burst Media’s publishers.

And that’s without any targeting technology. Last year, Blinkx added behavioral targeting to its video ad network, which could create even more opportunity to drive higher CPMs through publisher sites.

Blinkx will pay $4.5 million in cash as part of the deal, with the remainder being paid through the issuance of new shares of stock. After the deal closes, Blinkx will have approximately $52.8 million in cash on hand. In exchange, Blinkx expects Burst Media revenues of around $33-$34 million. That will drive full year revenues at Blinkx up nearly 90 percent year-over-year, to approximately $65 million. Blinkx says that it will retain the majority of Burst Media senior management, with Co-Founders Jarvis Coffin and David Stein staying on to aid in the management transition.

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Blinkx Issues Shares Worth $8.1 Million; company turns to stock market after losses associated with infrastructure deployment grew. (paidContent)

Break Partners with Southern Comfort for Social Sportz Net; web series will show dudes how to plan holiday parties. (MediaWeek)

The Colbert Report Sponsors U.S. Speedskating Team; “Colbert Nation” will be on the team’s uniforms. (Associated Press)

Sorenson Launches Squeeze 6; new video and encoding software promises higher quality video and faster speeds. (release)

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CIMM Lauches Web Site; the Nielsen rival debuts cimm-us.org and prepping to release RFPs this week. (Broadcasting & Cable)

Microsoft Drops Family Guy Sponsorship; Window 7 will no longer be sponsoring an episode of the cartoon after the company realized the show is pretty… off-color. (MediaMemo)

AT&T Sponsors Vevo; telco enters into a branding and marketing agreement with the upcoming music video site. (paidContent)

In-Stat: Disney’s Keychest Will Beat Others to Market; though the research firm says mouse house’s digital content access service will take time to catch on with consumers. (Video Business)

Blinkx Launches Music Video Search Tool; Blinkx Music has indexed more than 33,000 hours of music vids from roughly 10,000 artists. (CNET)

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Universal Music Group Can’t Sue Veoh’s Investors; judge throws the part of UMG’s complaint that accuses Shelter Capital, Spark Capital and Eisner’s Tornante Company of “vicarious copyright infringement” and “inducement of copyright infringement.” (TechCrunch)

A Breakdown of Super Bowl Ads Online; 4,000 clips of ads from the big game have been uploaded and have received more than 75 million views. (Visible Measures)

SAG Feud Goes to Court; drama over the ousting of the union’s former executive director and chief negotiator continues, judge denies SAG president’s request for a restraining order against the union and the national board. (The New York Times)

PlayOn Releases Beta; software moves Hulu, CNN and other content from Windows PC to TV-connected boxes like Xbox 360, PS3 and other DLNA and UPnP devices. (Zatz Not Funny!)

Jaman Gets Indie Distributor E1′s Titles; deal will expand movie rental company’s library with roughly 3,000 feature films, documentaries and TV shows. (The Hollywood Reporter)

Blinkx Changes Up its Homepage; new buttons such as “Entertain Me” and “Inform Me” deliver automated entertainment and news streams. (Contentinople)

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Cuban Acquires Stake in Carmike Cinemas; Cuban, who also has a stake in Landmark Theaters, bought 9.4 percent of Carmike for $2.8 million. (Associated Press)

College Footbal Scores Online; ESPN online served up more than 101 million college football feature and highlight video streams this season. (MediaPost)

Warner Music Acts Upset Over YouTube Yanking; Amanda Palmer, an artist signed to a Warner subsidiary, says Warner has no bargaining power and even if it did get more money from YouTube, it’s unlikely she’d see any of it. (Techdirt) See our previous coverage.

Blinkx Releases New Ad Format; the “un-roll” is like a branded barn door that slowly opens as the content begins to play. You can see the demo here.

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Blinkx, which has offices in San Francisco and London, is doing a little bargain hunting, as this current cash offer of 55 cents a share is far less than the $1.20 per share the company offered back in August. Blinkx dropped that initial bid in October.

The new bid represents a 108-percent premium over the closing price of MIVA’s shares on Nasdaq — at 26.4 cents — on Nov. 18, as Blinx’s notes in a statement. The company goes on to say that:

“[T]he MIVA business has reported a decline in cash for the past four quarters, and blinkx is concerned that valuable time has been wasted whilst MIVA’s resources dwindled, resulting in constraints on capital to facilitate growth. Moreover, MIVA has resorted to an expensive line of credit to fund future operations, which is also likely to impact future growth prospects in exchange for short-term working capital benefits.”

But despite all this, Blinkx sees an opportunity to integrate its AdHoc ad technology across MIVA’s consumer sites, monetize traffic from MIVA’s search ad network, and build on MIVA’s toolbar network.

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Time Warner Reacts to LIN Dispute By Urging People Online; after the two companies didn’t reach an agreement, Time Warner displays a URL on channels formerly occupied by LIN that hosts a video on how to watch TV programs online. (The New York Times)

Blinkx Drops Bid to Buy Miva; video search company will not be acquiring the pay-per-click ad network. (paidContent)

Comcast to Hike Rates; third price increase since January 2007, cable co. blames the economy (convenient!). (RedOrbit)

Video Advertisers Looking to Display Ads; companies like Apple are inserting video into banners and moving beyond the in-stream slots. (AdWeek)

Conde Naste Using Mobile Vid-Casting for Bridal Fashion Shows; company using Flixwagon to live-stream footage that will be featured on Bride.com’s Wedded Bits blog. (MediaWeek)

Access Hollywood Partnering with iVillage; fluffy entertainment news magazine will have a module on the women’s site that will include video. (The Hollywood Reporter)

Iron Man‘s Popularity Brings Down Servers; number of people trying to access the BD-Live content brought down Paramount’s tech. (CrunchGear)

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blinkx BBTV now plays Flash files directly in the browser. However, I found it quite hard to figure out how and where to launch the player from the text index. The actual player interface is quite nice, but doesn’t go fully full-screen (click to enlarge the screenshot). It also seems a bit awkward that blinkx is re-hosting videos when they’re available in Flash elsewhere, but I guess that makes for smoother navigation. Videos are offered from categories like lifestyle, news and info, sports, and adult (which requires a birthdate and parental pin). For the most part, the content available was originally made for the web.

BBTV was previously available only as a Windows download. blinkx also offers a variety of other products such as video search, a contextual-advertising platform, and an index of web programming called blinkx Remote.

Elsewhere, Veoh, which launched another would-be Joost called VeohTV, doesn’t even provide a link to download its client from the front page of its site. AOL also got rid of its Hi-Q service. But clients aren’t dead everywhere; outside of the U.S. market, especially in places like China, they’re all the rage.

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