Quantcast, an open Internet ratings service, has announced that it raised $20 million in second-round venture financing from Founders Fund and Polaris Venture Partners. Their service, which provides audience profile data to publishers, is, for now, is free to anyone to use.

In November, Quantcast named Adam Gerber their Chief Marketing Officer.

Video syndicator and pre-roll provider Broadband Enterprises has raised $10 million from Velocity Interactive, a VC firm helmed by Ross Levinsohn, the former President of Fox Interactive and Jonathan Miller, AOL’s former Chairman and CEO.

According to TechCrunch’s coverage, this is the first outside money it is taking. Velocity is putting up the entire A round itself. “They are cash-flow positive and making money today,” says Miller, on tens of millions of dollars in revenues. That’s an easy investment decision.

Tremor Media announced that it has closed a Series B round of funding of $11 million. The round was led by Canaan Partners and Masthead Venture Partners, both of which led Tremor’s prior round of funding. This financing raises the total investment in the company to $19.4 million, including the previous round of $8.4 million that closed in September of 2006.

“Tremor has not only proven its vision for the online video advertising market, but has excelled in executing on that vision,” said Warren Lee, principal at Canaan Partners. “With the video advertising market growing rapidly and expected to surpass $3 billion by 2010, few companies understand the market as well as Tremor Media, which has quickly established itself as an industry and technology leader. Canaan is thrilled to continue its support of Tremor Media as it expands the reach of its innovative platform to a greater number of advertisers and publishers worldwide.”

Tremor Media will use the funds to accelerate strategic growth plans, continue to extend its leadership position in online video advertising, expand its product offering to advertisers and publishers with new video ad formats and publisher tools, and enhance the flexibility of its technology platform to quickly respond to trends in the online video ad industry.

Disclosure: I am the Sr. Director of Marketing and Communications for Tremor Media

There is a lot of money flooding into digital media from private equity. While this influx won’t kill the Hollywood studio system it will have an impact on the future of communication and will force the studios to adapt.

One of the guys directing the flow of PE funding into digital media is ex-FOX exec Ross Levinsohn, who sat down with WSJ’s Kara Swisher last week for an interview.

If you’re looking to fund your new media venture we have added a list of VC/PE firms focused on investing in digital media startups to our links page.

We kid you not. In quick response to their board of directors abandoning ship, Roo Media Group named Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, currently the CEO of JumpTV, their new CEO and Chairman.

According to the press release, Tuzman and his KIT Capital Ltd. has been granted the right to purchase up to 51% of the preferred class of shares in the Company at US$0.38 per share. KIT Capital has the option to invest up to US$5 million in common shares of the Company at US$0.16 per share, a 15% premium to the closing price yesterday, December 18th, 2007.

Tuzman is probably best remembered to layfolks as the star of the 2001 documentary, “StartUp.com,” a film about life in the first dot-com bubble and their company, GovWorks.com, which burned through nearly $60 million in 18 months.

In related news, JumpTV Inc. (AIM: JTV) announced that it had bought back 25,000 common shares at an average price of Cdn$2.20 per share.

The high-def and DVD-quality p2p video distribution platform Vuze has landed $20 million in funding, according to an article in MultiChannel News.

For those who are unfamiliar with Vuze, it is built on top of the Azureus bittorrent client, one of the most popular, and open-source, file-sharing utilities. Just like Napster and BitTorrent.com, Vuze is a legal re-incarnation of what was formerly a platform for piracy. Some of their 100+ content partners include Showtime, Starz, A&E, BBC, PBS, and The History Channel.

“The ironic reality of the writers’ strike is its irrelevancy,” leads Jack Myers’ blog post on Mediapost.

Not unlike the music industry, Myers points out that, “Today, fewer than one network television series in twelve breaks through to profitability. This one program in twelve has to support the enormous operating overhead of those who risk capital to develop and produce the programs. It is a business of failure, not success. The Writers Guild of America wants a piece of that American Dream — the ability to fail time and time and time again, and ultimately have a profitable business.”

I can’t envision any scenario where writers get to simply sit and write and expect to benefit financially whether or not their scripts are ever developed. So perhaps they must fight the good fight now to protect what little future upside they have in any distribution model.

Alas, Bill Gates flexes his muscles and wins the battle to throw millions of dollars at Facebook.

The AP is reporting that Microsoft will acquire a measly 1.6% of the booming social network for less than a quarter-billion dollars, a significantly smaller slice of the pie (and smaller bill) than the rumored $1.5 Billion for 10% that was tossed around yesterday.

“The opportunity to further collaborate as advertising partners is a big reason we have decided to take an equity stake, and is a strong statement of our confidence in the long-term economics of this partnership,” said Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft’s Platforms & Services division.

According the the press release, “Under the expanded strategic alliance, Microsoft will be the exclusive third-party advertising platform partner for Facebook, and will begin to sell advertising for Facebook internationally in addition to the United States.”

On Aug. 22, 2006, the companies announced a U.S.-only strategic alliance that named Microsoft the exclusive provider of standard banner advertising on Facebook using Microsoft’s digital advertising solutions and the Microsoft(R) adCenter platform. That deal was later extended through 2011. However, Facebook’s most appealing feature is its open architecture, enabling anyone to develop widgets and other mini-apps to run on the site, including those which serve advertising. Could this be the dirty little secret limiting the size and scope of this deal? I’m all ears.

Industry watchers can now eagerly await the Nov. 6th meeting where Facebook will announce their new advertising products. Where that leaves ad-widget provider VideoEgg in the mix is anyone’s guess.

Video ad network BrightRoll has announced that they secured $5 million in Series B funding from two new investors - Adams Street Capital and KPG Ventures - and an existing investor, TRUE Ventures.

More interesting, however, is BrightRoll’s tag and boilerplate.

BrightRoll is the world’s largest and most trusted video advertising network, having served more than 1 billion advertisements in 12 months.

Thats just not a lot of impressions for a 12 month period.

PE Hub reports that Move Networks has raised $34m, and Liz Gannes at NTV quotes a Move spokesperson who claims the company will soon be “the undisputed big money raiser in 2007 in online video space.”

UPDATED 10/2: A Move PR consultant contacted us saying “there are no hints of things to come…Move hasn’t to me, or to anyone else, made that claim.”

With so much money going into companies that change the way content is delivered, how long until these companies start moving back down the line and investing more heavily in network infrastructure?

Granted, it is easier for existing network providers like NTT, Level 3 & Verisign to move forward into CDN services, but with all that money why not own a better network?