Well, it’s been an interesting last few weeks (and last few years, for that matter) for Israeli-headquartered video-conferencing specialist, RadVision. Acquisition rumors are currently swirling around the company, based on Israeli newspaper Globes’ report that the company is in ‘advanced’ talks with Avaya, a business collaboration and communications company, for a sale of approximately $200 million.

The official word we’ve received from RadVision spokespeople is that, of course, they do not comment on “rumors or speculation”. But our Israeli sources did say, without confirming, that an acquisition will very likely happen, even if it doesn’t end up at $200 million. As Globes points out, RadVision has been looking for a potential acquisition candidate since late 2009, when its largest client, Cisco Systems (which accounted for about one-third of its revenue), bought its Norwegian videoconferencing rival, Tandberg, for $3.3 billion.

Since then, RadVision has been on the defense, looking for — but not finding — the right candidate, losing money, as further talks with HP broke down last year when the two could not agree on price. Yet, over recent weeks, RadVision’s stock has gone from sinking to soaring, up 108 percent since November 29th on acquisition rumors, and holding a market cap of about $180 million. (Of course, after hours trading was not so kind to the company, as shares tumbled 12 percent Wednesday.)

As to Avaya, it announced plans for an IPO back in June, but the public offering has been repeatedly delayed. Meanwhile, over the last year, Avaya has made a number of acquisitions of late, and with quite a few unified communications products, video conferencing among them, RadVision would be a nice pick-up — if they can be convinced it’s worth $200 million.

Interestingly, amidst all this coverage and speculation, RadVision quietly announced today that it is ramping up its offerings for SMBs, rolling out a suite of video solutions that is intended to bring the company’s enterprise video solution to startups and small business for a much lower cost than traditional, full-scale solutions.

RadVision is clearly hoping that by offering high definition audio, video, and content sharing, like HD video room system capabilities with embedded multi-party conferencing, desktop conferencing with firewall traversal, and support for mobile in packaged solutions, it will be able to find a new audience for products and boost revenues.

The leg-up for RadVision is that they have a robust suite of enterprise-grade conferencing products, especially for the European market, but startups like AnyMeeting are also offering web-based video conferencing and webinar services — for free.

Granted, they don’t have the same scale or number of features, but with its recent announcement that it is now offering Google Apps integration to enable web conferencing to Google users in a single sign-on solution — on top of six-way video conferencing, the ability to host meetings of up to 200 attendees with no time limits, screen sharing, app sharing, recording, and social media integration — the competition from U.S. startups is at least moving in the right direction. AnyMeeting is just one example.

RadVision still has a robust suite of communication tools, and expanding to offer support to SMBs certainly helps its case, but we’ll see what happens to the price as it attempts to ink a deal with Avaya. We’ll update as we learn more.

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Online video platform company Brightcove this morning announced that it has filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the SEC in connection with a proposed IPO of its common stock. The company is looking to raise up to $50 million through the offering.

Brightcove offers cloud-based solutions for publishing and distributing video and other digital media.

Brightcove’s revenue grew from $24.5 million in the fiscal year ended December 31, 2008, to $43.7 million in the fiscal year ended December 31, 2010, the filing reveals.

Revenue came in at $28.4 million for the six months ended June 30, 2011.

The company’s isn’t profitable – they report a net loss of $9.7 million for the first half of this year – and Brightcove says it doesn’t expect to be in the black until the end of 2012.

The company says in the filing that it had close to 3,300 customers in over 50 countries as of June 30, 2011, including The New York Times Company, Oracle, AOL, Philips Electronics, Macy’s, Bank of America, the U.S. Army and Honda. It currently has close to 300 employees.

The company also reveals that it signed a new lease for over 80,000 square feet of office space in Boston, Massachusetts. The company says it expects to move into its new HQ on April 1, 2012.

In May 2011, Brightcove announced the release of ‘App Cloud’, a software application development and management platform designed to help customers publish and distribute video through software apps across multiple Internet-connected devices. The company says it expect its first commercial sale in the second half of 2011.

Brightcove filed to list on the NASDAQ Global Market under the ticker “BCOV”.

Whether this is the right time to file for an IPO is up for debate, of course. Due to the global economic turmoil, a bunch of recent IPO candidates just decided to delay their offerings.

Brightcove’s offering is being made through Morgan Stanley, Stifel Nicolaus, RBC Capital Markets, Pacific Crest Securities, and Raymond James.

The company’s list of investors include Accel Partners, General Catalyst Partners, AOL, IAC and Hearst Ventures, among others.

Also read: Brightcove Streaming 700 Million Videos A Month; Granted Broad Patent For Online Video

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Online video technology and footage licensing services provider Thought Equity Motion has raised $25 million from Shamrock Capital Advisors, the company announced this morning.

The company delivers video archive management and “smart content” metadata tools as a cloud service, as well as rights development expertise. Through its Web platform and global sales force, the company licenses a wide range of sports, news, entertainment, editorial, and creative content.

Thought Equity offers its video technology and management infrastructure solutions to media companies, news organizations, sports right holders and video production companies worldwide. Customers include BBC, Paramount, National Geographic, Sony Pictures Entertainment and the NYT.

The company says ‘tens of thousands’ of video producers use its video licensing platform on a daily basis.

Thought Equity’s new investor, Shamrock Capital Advisors, is an independent Los Angeles-based private equity firm focused on the media, entertainment, and communications industries.

In 2010, Shamrock’s private equity activities were formally separated from Shamrock Holdings, the family office for the late Roy E. Disney, a longtime senior executive for The Walt Disney Company, which his father Roy Oliver Disney and his uncle Walt Disney founded.

Thought Equity CEO Kevin Schaff told The Denver Post that a small portion of the funds from Shamrock Capital Partners has been used to pay off an old investor.

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In just about a half hour, Google will announce their Q2 2011 results. After that, at 1:30 PM PT, they’ll do their usual Q&A. Thankfully this time, they’re going back to YouTube to stream the thing, instead of relying on Microsoft’s awful technology for such things. You’ll be able to follow along here, but we’ll also be listening and taking notes.

For now, enjoy the entire video of the 2011 stockholder’s meeting that Google held in early June. The meeting features CEO Larry Page, co-founder Sergey Brin, Chairman Eric Schmidt, and others talking about all things Google for 90 minutes. This video was also made available on the YouTube Google investors site, but it doesn’t look like too many people have watched it yet.

Enjoy.

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Perhaps they looked at Apple and said not “oh no, they’re going to get us” but “man, how come we haven’t tried alternative methods of capitalizing on this huge, loyal user base?” This was years ago, mind you, and they still haven’t really branched out (Wii Speak?), but we’re beginning to see the new, rich experience roll out, however slowly. Their curated video channel of 3D content is just about to go live on Japanese 3DSes, for instance. Finally!

The service offers selected videos — a fashion show, a 3D tour of Kyoto — but no access to popular web video services. It’ll be coming to the US later this summer, presumably with content a little more relevant than the latest trends hitting the teen streets of Shinjuku. Netflix will be joining it, and you’ll be able to download an app to watch any streaming content you have access to on your 3DS. Hey, that could be pretty handy.

[via Joystiq]

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DIGIOP Technologies, a developer of video and data management software solutions, this morning announced that an investor group led by The Carlyle Group has acquired them earlier this month. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

DIGIOP offers a suite of video and data management solutions, primarily for the surveillance industry, and plans to launch the next version of its client software Reflection later this spring, the company said in a statement.

By combining video with information from back-office systems, DIGIOP extends the value of the former beyond the traditional surveillance benefits of loss prevention, risk management, and security. DIGIOP essentially provides its clients with real-time and recorded, video-enhanced business intelligence solutions for operations, marketing, and merchandising, and information technology groups.

DIGIOP was founded in 2001 and is headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana.

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LiveU, which markets solutions for live video transmissions over wireless networks, this morning announced that it has raised $11 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Pitango Venture Capital and joined by existing investors Carmel Ventures and Canaan Partners.

LiveU has raised a total of $23 million in venture capital to date.

Founded in 2006, LiveU develops technology for the transmission of high-quality live video from the field directly to the Internet and TV sets, by using wireless networks such as 3G, WiFi and WiMAX.

Recently, the company launched its next-gen HD platform, featuring advanced RF technology for resilient transmission even in poor cellular reception areas, in addition to affordable worldwide roaming.

Its customer include TV networks, news agencies and online media giants. LiveU has been used extensively in a wide array of events, including the World Cup in South Africa, the GRAMMY Awards in the US, the Beijing Olympics, and G20 Summits.

LiveU’s R&D center is based in Israel, and sales, marketing and support headquarters are based in New Jersey, USA. Isaac Hillel, Managing General Partner at Pitango Venture Capital, will be joining LiveU’s Board of Directors.

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Conviva, a San Matea, California based video streaming solutions provider, has raised $15 million in Series C funding, bringing the total capital secured by the company to a healthy $44 million since its launch in 2006.

The round was led by GGV Capital (formerly Granite Global Ventures) and joined by existing investors Foundation Capital, New Enterprise Associates and Pelion Venture Partners.

Conviva markets technology that helps broadcasters deliver high-quality video over the Internet at scale, “protecting” audiences from sub-par video streaming experiences and thus increasing viewing times for digital content.

The company provides real-time visibility into each viewer’s video session as well as the entire online video ecosystem to predict when an interruption is about to occur and, in advance, uses its proprietary switching technology to prevent an issue from reaching the viewer.

In addition, Conviva deploys control intelligence systems to adapt bit rate delivery and performs stream switching across multiple delivery networks.

Conviva says it has optimized over a billion video streams to date, for some of the largest broadcasters on the Internet. During the recent 2010 FIFA World Cup, Conviva managed more than 200 million streams, reached more than 30 million unique viewers and handled three billion viewer minutes worldwide.

The company intends to use the new financing to expand the company’s global footprint and invest in new industry segments to meet the growing demand for high-quality online video.

Of note: at the helm of the company is Darren Feher, who joined Conviva in October 2009 from NBC Universal, where he last served as executive vice president and CTO.

Conviva was founded by Dr. Hui Zhang, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, and Dr. Ion Stoica, scientist, author and Associate Professor of Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley.

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Once a video is transcribed, it appears in a collapsible window below each player. Not only is all the text visible to search engines, and thus should help drive more search traffic to individual videos, but the text is all time-stamped. So you can click on any sentence and it will jump to that point in the video. Anytime somebody cuts and pastes a portion of the transcript in a blog or other site, a link back to that point in the video is also included. The startup tried doing a Flash wrapper before for the YouTube player. It completely reworked its technology into what it is now calling the SpeakerBar that is more of a transcript plug-in that detects any video on your site that has a matching plug-in. SpeakerText works with video players from YouTube, Brightcove, and Blip.tv, and there is also a WordPress plug-in.

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