Overlay.TV has completed a $4.6 million Series A financing round and will be launching its Internet video-advertising platform on February 14, 2008. The funding, from Celtic House Venture Partners, EdgeStone Capital Partners and Tech Capital Partners, will provide Overlay.TV with the resources required to successfully deploy its innovative solution.

The Overlay.TV platform allows viewers to interact with online video, and enables content owners and distributors to monetize their video assets. As video streams from its original location, such as leading video sharing sites, viewers are able to opt-in to receive “overlays” which provide contextual information about the content being viewed. The overlay technology allows any image in a video to be ‘hyper-enabled’ and allows a viewer to click on the image, right in the video, and take any number of desired actions that are directly associated with the context of the image being viewed.

The overlays can be embedded in external web pages, online shops, blogs and social network profiles. The simplicity and elegance of the Overlay.TV technology means that anyone posting video content will have a tool to add contextual information directly onto the video content –- no pre-roll, no post-roll, no banners, and no changes to the video at all.

Authors, content owners and e-commerce providers are able to offer advertisers a measurable return on investment for their product placements, without increasing the costs associated with video production.

“The huge uptake of online video, both professional and user-generated, has created phenomenal opportunities for advertisers and content owners seeking to monetize their assets and reach. However, the fundamental challenge of delivering the right message at the right time still exists,” said Rob Lane, President/CEO of Overlay.TV. “Some interesting attempts to infer video context have started to emerge, but none have proven to be very effective. Empowering users to determine context explicitly and giving them the tools to create their own interactions and ads are what Overlay.TV delivers. We have enabled product placement for the masses and have provided viewers with a simple way to buy what they see in online video.”

“People are struggling to monetize video on the internet and to date, none of the solutions have been overly compelling,” said Andrew Waitman, Managing Partner, Celtic House Venture Partners. “Overlay.TV has taken a complex issue and developed a solution that enables anyone to add interactivity and advertising to online video.”