It’s interesting that Microsoft didn’t just acquire YuMe; the two have worked together before, making matters of long-term usefulness and trust look like less of an issue than usual.  But for whatever reason (perhaps YuMe’s backers see an even brighter future for the comparatively small company), this agreement was reached instead, and the deal should take effect this summer.

Rob Bennett, Microsoft’s general manager of MSN Entertainment, Video & Sports, explained the basic idea, stating, "YuMe offers the ability to connect additional ad networks to its platform, and we plan on utilizing this service to provide YuMe and other ad networks access to Microsoft’s unsold video inventory."

For its part, YuMe claims to have a network of over 400 websites and reach something in the neighborhood of 120 million unique visitors.

More immediately relevant details – including any figure attached to a dollar sign – are pretty much nonexistent, so we’ll have to see what trickles out as operations ramp up.

My friends who I’ve been talking with in the business tell me that money has finally started to show up. Andy Plesser’s videos are now seeing Adobe advertising over on Blip.tv, for instance. To get the latest I went over to YuMe Networks, one of the better video advertising networks. Here YuMe’s CEO shows me the latest in online video advertising.

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That’s what I get for trying to be cute.

The company says the new program is the first of its kind, offering customized and targeted downloaded or streamed content, displayable on any digital content player.

First up to break into the peer-to-peer space is software publisher Eidos Interactive, who pushed Tomb Raider Lara Croft through the BitTorrent cracks to promote the game’s ten-year anniversary edition.

Advertising on p2p networks slow to develop, says YuMe, because Web publishers couldn’t measure and track video ad viewing. YuMe claims to have solved that problem, with a technology the company developed to measure "view-throughs" rather than click-throughs.

The technology directly measures and reports on viewer behavior, showing how many people viewed the content, the number of times they viewed, and whether they clicked on anything. It also allows advertisers to geo-target its audience with appropriate messages.

The premiere Tomb Raider campaign will be featured on select video files from television’s G4, distributed through the BitTorrent Entertainment Network.

“We have been working diligently with a range of video publishers from the largest movie studios to the creators of independent video to advocate the role advertising can play in delivering their content to the BitTorrent community,” said Ashwin Navin, President and co–founder of BitTorrent.

YuMe’s trademarked video sensor technology first crawls the Web to gather video content, and then categorizes the videos into channels. Advertisers can choose which channels to target based on which ones match their brand, product or message. 

It remains to be seen how p2p fans will react to suddenly having ads dropped into their downloads. Mike Abundo of EmergingEarth.com thinks pre-roll and post-roll videos are a better option than traditional commercial breaks:

For both advertisers and viewers, narrowly-targeted prerolls and postrolls work far better with asynchronous online video than broadly-targeted commercial breaks. It’ll take some time for TV network dinosaurs to wrap their brains around that simple idea — but they’d better do it soon, if they want to save what few good TV shows they have left from the fall of TV.