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"Blip.tv announced today that it has raised $10.1 million in its third round of institutional funding. Led by Canaan Partners and existing investors Bain Capital Venture, this new round comes as blip.tv approaches its fifth birthday.\nWe spoke with co-founder and CEO Mike Hudack about what the new investment capital will mean for blip.tv and why blip.tv has continued to grow in such a crowded and competitive industry.\nHudack told us that when blip.tv was founded in 2005, the idea was simply \"to change the entertainment industry by making independent show production sustainable and scalable.\" Hudack told us that a core part of blip.tv's mission over the last five years has been to bridge the gap between the computer and the television and to bring quality online content everywhere.Blip.tv debuted at the very beginning of the web video boom. Along with services like YouTube, blip.tv was one of the earliest places that users could upload their own content to then serve via their own sites.\nSo why has blip.tv not only survived, but continued to grow when so many others have either had to scale back or have folded to competitive pressures?\nHudack told us there are a couple of reasons for blip.tv's success:\n\nblip.tv has zeroed in its focus on cultivating quality content creators and taking a larger role in ensuring the success of that content.\nblip.tv has been very bullish in the connected TV space, signing deals with companies like Roku, Boxee, TiVo and Sony Bravia to bring blip.tv content to those devices.\n\nIncreased Focus on Internal Ad Sales\nIn the last year, blip.tv has expanded its internal sales force from just a few people to include offices all over the world, including a new sales office in London. At this point, 85% of the advertising on blip.tv programming (revenues are split 50/50 between content creators and blip.tv) is a result of direct-sold ads with brands like Pepsi, Samsung, Starbucks and AT&amp;T.\nBy taking a larger role in creating these advertising partnerships, blip.tv is better able to pair appropriate advertising with the shows it hosts on its network and is also able to better leverage the overall size of its network. \nThe average length of a blip.tv program is a little more than 14 minutes. As Hudack points out, this is closing in on the 22-minute (well, really more like 20.5-minute) length of a traditional television show. With content this long, selling advertising space and integrating ad breaks into content becomes less of a struggle than with content that is, say, under five minutes in length.\nBlip.tv doesn't create content itself; instead it provides content creators with tools for distribution, advertising management, promotion and statistical analysis. The latest funding round will be used to help continue to shore up its advertising teams, help create new and better tools for content creators and to help get blip.tv programs more exposure and syndication deals across more networks and devices.\nBetting Big on Connected TV\nBlip.tv is unique in the hosted video space for its focus on integrating with connected TV solutions. Like YouTube, you can find blip.tv programming and applications on television sets, set-top boxes and media center software. Hudack told us that blip.tv intends to continue to invest in the expansion of these projects, which in turn raises the exposure for its content creators and can feed into better advertising deals.\nBy being bullish on connected devices, blip.tv is anticipating what we are already starting to see across the greater consumer landscape; the convergence between the traditional media space is, at long last, finally taking place. Consumers don't want to have to segment how they view programming, rather online programming and traditional broadcasting should be able to exist side-by-side no matter what device the user is watching.\nA key difference between blip.tv and many of the other players in this space is that the focus is not just on the computer screen, but on all types of consumer screens.\nMobile, HTML5 and the Future\nBlip.tv isn't investing in mobile as heavily as it is in greater advertising and the connected television space, but mobile is definitely part of blip.tv now and part of its future. The iPhone and iPad both have optimized blip.tv home pages and most embedded blip.tv content can be played back on either device.\nAndroid support is planned in the future, but no specific date was given in our interview. Hudack told us that there are plans to better integrate HTML5 and HTTP streaming for advertisements across its network, which will mean big things for future mobile devices in the future.\nAs we were ending our call, Hudack gave me this takeaway: \"When we started blip.tv, the idea was to imagine what the first television network would be like if it was created in 2005, rather than in 1939.\"  Just five years later, the landscape for broadcast and online content has evolved even further. If 2005 was 1939, I would liken 2010 to 1951/1952 and the mainstream adoption of TV and the innovations of pre-recorded television and the 3-camera setup pioneered by I Love Lucy.\nInternet content has come a long way in just half a decade; we can't wait to see it evolve over the next five years.\n\n\nFor more business  coverage, follow Mashable Business on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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