After talking to many startups over the last year YouTube picked their best ideas and came up with these overlay ads, similar to what VideoEgg and New York-based ScanScout have developed. Apologies for the whiny guitar band.

ScanScout has ‘met with and talked to YouTube’ a year ago, before current CEO Doug McFarland came on board. ‘Google plays everything very close to the vest,’ McFarland told me last June. ‘And with a small company like ours they could potentially take away your ideas.’

ScanScout wasn’t avoiding YouTube. One of their investors had lunch with YouTube founder Chad Hurley last Spring. ‘But we don’t have to go to YouTube,’ McFarland said, citing the video portal’s copyright problems. ‘We’re talking to a number of very big publishers.’