More money pouring into rich media; Move Networks adds more funding

Update: Couple of corrections/clarifications. The Move's total funding is $67.9 million, not $91.3 million, thanks to Dan Rayburn for the tip. Also, I thought this was implied, but Move will be using Silverlight as a way to distribute video, so Silverlight gets the adaptive streaming and Move gets more penetration. Thanks to Don for the comment.

Move Networks is announcing that they've raised a $46 million C round today from a variety of interesting companies including Cisco and Comcast Interactive Media. Move has gained a lot of ground as a high definition delivery mechanism for ABC.com and others. One of the things that makes Move interesting is the ability to change the bitrate of the streamed content based on how much bandwidth is available to the person watching the stream. They partnered with Microsoft around that feature so that Silverlight could take advantage of it.

The downside to Move is that they require their own browser plugin in order to view content. I haven't seen any kind of penetration numbers for the plugin but the company says it reaches 6.5 million people a month. Not a huge number when you consider the number of people on the web but they're definitely doing a number of things right when it comes to HD video.

I think Move helped paved the way for HD video and has been great for the web. It's encouraged companies like Adobe and Microsoft to be better about their HD offerings and because it's been laser focused on one thing, video, it's been able to innovate. I'm not sure what will happen in the long run as both Adobe and Microsoft keep getting better, but with a total of $91.3 million raised, they've got a big warchest.