One way they often do this is by installing a system running Hadoop. This is the open source tool that evolved out of work done by Google and Yahoo, and basically takes big blocks of data and makes analyzing it a manageable process. The creation of a thriving business environment around Hadoop, which by itself is freely available, has attracted mountains of venture capital funding to start-ups such as Cloudera and Hortonworks.

Add another Hadoop player to the pile. Today, Mortar Data, a company devoted to making Hadoop easier to use, will announce a round of seed funding. Usually I don’t pay much attention to companies at the seed stage but in this case I made an exception, in part because the lineup of investors is so interesting. The lead investors are Chris Lynch, the former CEO of Vertica who left his job at Hewlett-Packard last month, and TechStars, the noted start-up accelerator, which is also a customer.

Other investors are Atlas Ventures, Genacast Ventures, and Great Oaks Ventures as well as Brightcove founder and CTO Bob Mason, and Matt Turck, managing director of Bloomberg Ventures, the venture capital arm of Bloomberg LP, the financial data and media concern. The precise amount of the funding hasn’t been disclosed.

As widely used as Hadoop is, it requires a lot of specialized knowledge, says K Young, Mortar’s CEO. Mortar’s secret is to use the Python programming language and Apache Pig, running on cloud infrastructure. The combination makes working with Hadoop a lot more accessible to people with more generalized programming knowledge. It’s not all that different from SQL. Easy enough that Vertica has said it will offer Mortar’s solution to its clients. That makes Mortar Data worth watching.

Spoiler: It’s up!

That’s good news for a Web video company that’s trying to go public, and also not surprising. But the survey is a fun skim (PDF), with interesting nuggets about consumption on different kinds of platforms — Apple versus Android, etc. — and from different kind of publishers — TV-based sites like Hulu versus pure-play sites like YouTube, etc.

And buried in there is a good reminder of exactly what it is we do when we watch video on the Web: We don’t stick around.

We’re most likely to watch longest if we’re watching on a “broadcast” site like Hulu or NBC.com, but even then we’re not parked very long: The average session for one of those sites clocks in around 3:30, Brightcove says. It’s much less for anyone else.

So here’s a clip that’s just a tad over the broadcast average, and which should be on a broadcast site. Alas, NBC’s unlamented “Studio 60” isn’t available anymore on Hulu, so to track it down online you’ve got to hunt and peck on YouTube. This excellent “Network” homage is how the show’s pilot kicked off in 2006.

And while we’re on the topic — weird that this failed Aaron Sorkin show doesn’t get more love, especially in a post-“Social Network” world. Yes, it’s overwrought, over-the-top stuff, which treats a “Saturday Night Live”-like show as if it’s every bit as important as “The West Wing” — there’s even an Afghanistan kidnap plot late in the show’s single season. But whatever! I’d rather watch hours of flawed Sorkin stuff than almost anything else on TV. Surely there have to be more people like me out there. Right?

But compared to some of its peers, Brightcove is almost a throwback: CEO Jeremy Allaire’s company has a clearly defined business, straightforward accounting and a minimum of insider selling in the run-up to its IPO.

A quick glance at the the company’s filing will tell you that:

Brightcove’s business is easy to understand. It generates sales by helping Web publishers put video online. That “software as a service” model has let the company boost sales, along with the Web video boom. In 2006, it posted revenues of $1.4 million. Last year, it pulled in $43.7 million.

The company’s accounting doesn’t require a good imagination. There’s nothing in Brightcove’s S-1 along the lines of Groupon’s now-discarded “ACSOI,” or Demand Media’s novel approach to expensing content costs. And while plenty of established companies use not-strictly-official measures like EBITDA to show off their finances in the best possible light, Brightcove doesn’t bother — there’s not a single reference to “non-GAAP accounting.” Which makes it quite easy to see that the company lost $67.5 million from 2006 through 2010, and another $9.5 million in the first half of this year. It says it doesn’t expect to turn a profit until 2013 at the earliest.

Brightcove’s investors and employees are sticking around. Unlike Groupon, Zynga, and a few other highfliers that haven’t filed yet, including Twitter and Facebook, there’s been very little insider selling. Early investor AOL got rid of all of its shares last November, and last year Allaire sold off 1.3 million shares for a gain of $4.8 million; some other employees sold a few more shares. But Allaire still holds another 2.5 million shares — 4.5 percent of the company’s equity — and as far as I can tell, that’s about it for insider selling.

So it’s no surprise that the company announced an open-source, royalty-free HTML5 video format based on VP8 at its I/O conference Wednesday. What is surprising is the level of industry support Google has already rounded up.

Dubbed WebM, the format uses the VP8 codec for video and Vorbis codec for audio and is offered under a pretty permissive BSD-style license that makes it quite a bit more attractive than H.264, a rival format with pretty steep licensing fees.

Google is pushing the format hard. The company has convinced Mozilla and Opera to add WebM support to their browsers (Chrome support is obviously a given) and it has begun encoding all YouTube videos 720p or larger in the format.

Google has also lined up some 40 software and hardware vendors to support WebM. Among them: Oracle (ORCL), AMD (AMD), ARM (ARM), Nvidia (NVDA), Qualcomm (QCOM) and Brightcove. Also on the list: Adobe (ADBE), which plans to use VP8 for Flash.

An impressive lineup of supporters, though there are three notable omissions: Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT) and Intel (INTC). Will those companies come around and back the standard as well? Given enough industry support for VP8 playback through HTML5, they may have to. I’ve asked them and will update here if I hear back.

UPDATE: Intel tells me it will support WebM and V8, not because it particularly favors them but because it plans to support most video formats.

“We’re supportive of multiple formats,” a company spokesman told me. “We don’t support one format to the exclusion of another format.”

UPDATE: Interesting. There’s speculation that WebM may violate some H.264 patents. “VP8 is simply way too similar to H.264,” developer Jason Garrett-Glaser concludes after an exhaustive analysis of the format. “[A] pithy, if slightly inaccurate, description of VP8 would be “H.264 Baseline Profile with a better entropy coder”. Though I am not a lawyer, I simply cannot believe that they will be able to get away with this, especially in today’s overly litigious day and age. Even VC-1 differed more from H.264 than VP8 does, and even VC-1 didn’t manage to escape the clutches of software patents. Until we get some hard evidence that VP8 is safe, I would be extremely cautious. Since Google is not indemnifying users of VP8 from patent lawsuits, this is even more of a potential problem.”

And Twitter, of course, is designed for the ADD generation. But in a classic “two wrongs, one right” equation, it turns out that video watchers who’ve been directed to a clip via Twitter last an extra, extra, extra long time.

A full minute longer, says video platform Brightcove, which along with TubeMogul, just released a slug of information about music video consumption on the Web.

Which makes plenty of sense, if you think about it. A search result may get you something you think you want. But a recommendation from a Twitter pal means even more–if your pal likes it, and you like you pal, you’re more likely to invest more time.

By the same token, I’m guessing that some of you may spend more time on this 20-year-old (!) Beastie Boys clip, simply because I’ve embedded it. Enjoy!

beastie boys Shadrach

??????? | MySpace Video

The Cambridge, Mass., company received $12 million in new funding and expects to go public as soon as next year. It hopes the funds will consolidate its lead among firms that help companies post and manage videos to their own and others’ sites.

Competition is heating up. Last week Google Inc. (GOOG) purchased Brightcove rival Episodic Inc. for an undisclosed sum. ThePlatform, owned by Comcast Corp. (CMCS), is targeting large media companies, and Ooyala Inc., a Silicon Valley startup that has raised $20 million, also is going head-to-head with Brightcove, landing customers including Warner Bros. and General Mills Inc. (GIS).

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Here’s a video interview I did yesterday at the San Francisco event where Yahoo finally launched a lot of the new open and social elements that it has long said it was injecting into its most popular products.

BoomTown talked with the key movers of the initiatives: Ash Patel, Yahoo’s EVP of its Audience Product Division, and Tapan Bhat, its SVP of its Front Doors, Communities and Network Services.

(You can see screen shots and an official Yahoo video of the new features here.)

The initiatives Yahoo (YHOO) finally released into the wild have been long in the making, first discussed as just vaporware by Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (see that video below too).

Yahoo also hosted a session at its Sunnyvale HQ about its open plans in the fall.

And, after the longest of gestation periods, they arrived yesterday, in an impressive rollout.

The changes include some very deft rejiggering of Yahoo Mail, called a “smarter inbox,” with a new dashboard welcome page, easier ways to make connections, more filtered views, updates and third-party apps integrated into the application.

I thought the changes to the mail product were the most interesting, especially given the hundreds of millions of people using the product. It’s an interesting choice for a social entry point, aiming to give nonsocial-networking types enough of a taste of it without inundating them.

Of particular note were the third-party applications, such as for WordPress and Flickr, that launch nicely right in the email program.

Also cool was one app from Xoopit that surfaces old photos and photo links lost in the musty archives of old emails.

Yahoo also debuted an enhanced version of the homepage (previously announced in September) and My Yahoo, as well as a new toolbar and socialization elements added to its popular media properties.

It remains to be seen how popular these changes will become, especially since many consumers already have their social-networking lives on Facebook or MySpace.

In addition, both Time Warner (TWX) online unit AOL and Microsoft (MSFT) have rolled out similar social and open changes to their sites recently, making it super-confusing for everyone.

But, better late than never, I always say, so here’s Bhat and Patel talking about Yahoo’s new stuff.

I had to load the video onto YouTube, as Brightcove had snafus (also below is Yang talking about the concepts at CES in January 2008):

Tapan Bhat and Ash Patel

Jerry Yang at January 2008 CES