John Edwards, CEO of streaming content technology provider Move Networks, says that his company is close to finalizing a Series C round of venture capital that will be more than the $34 million that has been previously rumored.

"There was a leak out that said we raised $34 million," said Edwards in an interview with Contentinople yesterday. "That number is low."

Move is clearly onto something. It is growing like a weed out there in the Utah desert, going from 40 employees to 140 employees in one year. It's wrapped up some big media deals, including providing streaming video technology for Fox, ABC, Discovery Channel, and Oprah.com.

A recent Webcast by Move partner Oprah actually failed because of its own success, however. But analysts pointed their fingers at the ISPs, not Move, in the crash. Edwards says that in working on the Oprah broadcast, Move served up a half a petabyte of data for the night. (A petabyte is a quadrillion bytes, or 1000 terabytes.)

Edwards, a former Novell executive, attributes Move's initial success to its positioning as an outsourced technology partner for digital media providers who need the streaming video and advertising technologies to be integrated.

"Early on I made the decision we weren't going to be a portal -- a Joost or a Brightcove," says Edwards. "Instead, we would be a whitebox solution. We would provide an extension to an existing media team so that they could run their content at the quality they like."

This means that in addition to providing a media player that improves download time and quality by using caching techniques, Move also provides advertising tools for tracking and serving advertisements. Move's player behaves somewhat like a virtual set-top box, tracking user behavior and then serving up ads based on that behavior.

"It's much more than throwing a banner up there," says Edwards. "TV advertising is very different. Advertisers want to come in and be recognized with very popular content, and they want to be alongside that kind of thing. The way you set it up and present that is very important."

The American Fork, Utah-based company raised $11.3 million of funding in its first round in February of 2007. The funding was led by Hummer Winblad and Steamboat Ventures, a venture arm of Disney.

Commentary Monday, September 21. 2009 at 11:00 AM EDT Post a comment The Doctorow Is In

Commentary Thursday, September 10. 2009 at 01:00 PM EDT 6 comments Social Networks: Who Owns the Message?

Tuesday, September 1. 2009 at 10:50 AM EDT Post a comment Disney-Marvel, Part Deux: Too Expensive?

Monday, August 31. 2009 at 10:25 AM EDT 2 comments Marvel Bags $4B Deal With Disney

Wednesday, August 26. 2009 at 02:35 PM EDT Post a comment HuffPo's Cheesecake Pushes the Limits

Commentary Friday, August 14. 2009 at 01:25 PM EDT 1 comment Cuban Files: The Value of Content

Friday, August 7. 2009 at 10:45 AM EDT Post a comment Media & Media Tech Stocks: A Year Later

Wednesday, July 29. 2009 at 04:00 PM EDT 3 comments Quality Is Key to Online Video, Study Finds

News / Analysis Tuesday, July 28. 2009 at 02:50 PM EDT Post a comment Viacom Panic Subsides

Commentary Friday, July 17. 2009 at 12:10 PM EDT Post a comment Premium Satellite Content Shakedown