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San Francisco based CastTV has just raised $3.1 million in Series A Round, to revolutionize the way we search for videos online. The round was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, who have also invested in Kyte.tv recently. Warren Packard from DFJ will be joining the existing board members which include Marc Andreessen (founder of Netscape), and Ron Conway (angel investor in Google), where as Rajeev Motwani (Professor at Stanford and early strategic advisor to Google) is serving as a strategic advisor. CastTV has also announced a two year deal to offer its search technology to a major media corporation. Name of the media company, however, was not disclosed.

The company was founded by husband and wife team Edwin Ong and Alex Vikati in 2004. The couple initially met at Stanford and started a prior company, Filefish in 1999. Filefish raised just $4.6 million in venture funding and got acquired by Oracle in 2003.

CastTV will not be the first entrant to this market, Truveo, a video search company that launched in 2005 has already made a successful exit when it got acquired by AOL in early 2006 for an estimated $50 million. Truveo identifies videos on indexed pages, and then look for text surrounding the video links, as well as metadata included in the video along with the tags.

CastTV has adopted a similar approach to video search as that of Truveo. Although it still does not search inside the videos but then too does a good job of identifying video files associated with Flash, javascript and other media plugins like Microsoft’s Media Player, Apple’s Quicktime and RealNetwork’s media player. The service is also intelligent in identifying video files of some new entrants like Brightcove and VideoEgg. To gather even more information about videos CastTV crawls open source episode guides aggregating valuable metadata in the process. If there is a close match of this metadata with a video file in its index, CastTV adds this metadata to the content of the already indexed video.

Competitors to CastTV include Blinkx, Clipblast, Pixsy, PodZinger and Truveo. The startups in this space are flourishing because of Google’s video search being a walled garden. Google is currently not indexing videos across the web and its video search is limited to Google Video and Youtube. This is one area where Google is trying to mimic Yahoo. i.e by being a content producer instead of a search engine of the content.

CastTV will enter private beta nest month, with full launch due this summer.