Veoh has been saying since its inception that the heart of their service lies in their behavioral targeting ability, this is remember, a company backed by former big media execs who see video primarily as medium for delivering ads to consumers. Today at long last they released their targeting platform in beta.

The news comes after Veoh rolled out a number of additional features in recent weeks including a new player, a new discovery tool and Veoh Groups.

From the release:

Initially, Veoh’s new system targets ads and branded content to more than nine interest-based audience segments…Following the beta period, Veoh plans to enhance the system to identify additional audience segments and introduce performance improvements that will help provide even more customized offerings to advertisers. Tests of the new targeting system conducted on Veoh in advance of the beta launch yielded performance lifts of more than 2 times higher than standard ads on Veoh.

Veoh says they served more than 52 million minutes of video in June and the site currently gets about 21 million unique viewers a month.

Backed by Michael Eisner’s Tornante Company, Veoh has secured content from ESPN and ABC for their video portal, according to a Reuters report.

Veoh will show full episodes of some of ABC’s lineup as well as clips from ESPN’s shows and sports highlights.

Yes, thats vague. But I could tell you that my weekend pick was Matzah and gefilte fish, but thats not what I’m looking forward to at all.

Over the past week, I’ve spoken with reps from a number of the major video aggregators and streaming providers about their recommended settings for outputting video from the web to TV. I also purchased a monthly subscription to the MLB.TV Premium Package for their 1.2MB stream. I’ll be tweaking my video card and TV and starting OVW’s own convergence video shootout.

Beyond the novelty factor, what online video can really replicate - or even hold its own - against a TV offering? On my previous experiments, I’d been using an s-video output into a regular CRT display. Now we’ve added DVI/HDMI outputs to the mix, and a 1080p plasma TV to the mix, which may not be as forgiving. We’ll just have to see.

We’ve yet to decide if we’ll do a comprehensive comparison, or share our thoughts on a rolling basis, but I’m looking forward to Arrested Development on Hulu, a few movies on Netflix’s Watch Now, and maybe Veoh’s most popular content, Star Trek (ok, maybe less so for the Star Trek, but I’m sure I’ll find something to enjoy). I’ve had some issues with Microsoft’s Silverlight player with my previous MLB experiments, but I’m hoping they’ve worked through them. Do the TV networks have a leg up when the screen you watch on is a TV? My sofa and I look forward to finding out…..just as soon as we’re done with our Seder.

Brightcove inked syndication deals with 5 social networking sites. The five sites Bebo, Meebo, RockYou, Slide and Veoh are not all social networks exactly but they are where a reported 300 million people are consuming content so it makes a lot of sense for both sides.

Brightcove has content and wants more reach, these sites have users and need another revenue stream. How much these users actually want Brightcove content and how often they will view it remains to be seen.