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CBS Corporation has announced that it has completed the acquisition of CNET Networks Inc. The announcement which came on Monday also added that the CNET Networks’ operations will be merged in a new division of CBS Interactive. The new division integrates top most online brands of both companies in a single business unit. The announcement was made by President and Chief Executive Officer of CBS Corporation, Leslie Moonves.

Moonves on the occasion said :

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Joost, an IPTV based video service, is making news on a regular basis now. The company has now announced that it has raised $45 million from the likes of Sequoia Capital (based in Silicon Valley), Index Ventures (based in London and also investors in Skype), Li Ka-shing (a Hong Kong based business tycoon), Viacom and CBS. All the investers have taken a small minority stake in the company.

The interesting fact about the investment round is that Media corps i.e Viacom and CBS have increased their interests in Joost and have become investors instead of just being content partners. Sequoia and Index on the other hand are industry reknowned and war hardened VCs. Another key fact to note is that with Sequoia in Silicon Valley, Index Ventures in London and Li Ka-shing in Hong Kong, Joost has expanded its reach to 3 continents including the strategic and difficult to enter Chinese market. So all in all the investment round has brought a lot more than just a huge pile of cash into this startup.

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Brightcove has bagged yet another deal with CBS to syndicate CBS video news clips across its network of partner sites. In addition to this the news clips would also be viewable on Brightcove.com a video sharing site similar to Youtube.com. Brightcove network sites could embed the Brightcove media player on their sites and tune it to CBS News channel, enabling Brightcove to deliver a continuous stream of news clips from CBS Evening News, The Early Show and other CBS News shows.

Brightcove is already a partner in CBS Interactive Distribution Network and has created channels for CBS content on its site. Users could also remix and share the content on their own channels. Brightcove also has content deals with AOL, MTV and Discovery and has $81.2 million in three rounds of funding to back its deal making spree. See the explanation by Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire below.

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Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google-the world’s most popular and widely used advertising system, has announced that a new system called Claim Your Content is “very close to be turned on“. Schmidt made these comments in a one on one interview with John Seigenthaler, a former reporter with NBC’s Nightly News, at the National Association of Broadcasters Conference last night.

Google previously promised such a technology by the start of 2007, but later reports surfaced that it has decided to discard in-house development and will instead by using the content filtering technology provided by Audible Magic, which currently has MySpace as its major client.

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CBS has announced its own content distribution network on the web, that is being dubbed as “CBS Interactive Network”. CBS is describing it as “The most widely distributed professional content provider on the Web.” Some of the salient features of the Network are:

• Free, but ad supported content.
• Akamai will be serve as the network backbone for this Interactive Content Network.
• Financial details are not disclosed yet, but it is likely to be a 90-10 split with CBS getting 90% of the revenues.
• Mobile distribution is not part of the partnership, but CBS is open to it.

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