If today’s announcement that Google will launch Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane’s original web series across its network of AdSense sites sounds familiar that’s because the same parties made the exact same announcement last year. Someone, however, forgot to tell the New York Times, who managed to dust off the story, give it a fresh veneer and up the ante by quoting AdSense representative Kim Malone Scott as saying “We feel that we have recreated the mass media.”

Kim, you will never live that down.

No matter. I love what this deal represents, although I’m somewhat skeptical that users will adopt the model of clicking what has been defined as an advertisement in order to watch an advertisement in order to then watch a short blast of something MacFarlanely funny.

Let’s take a moment to understand what Google’s AdSense video product is and what it looks like. Here’s the ultra hip and edgy official explanation from the horse’s mouth itself. Cool music Googlers! See all the ads? That could be a problem. More on that later.

I want to stress that this is a watershed deal for Hollywood. Many of my cohorts are holding out hope that Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy is a smashing success. I’m crossing my fingers too, because in success, the value of premium, talent-driven content that can sell against advertising gets a much needed boost.

Interesting to note that while this deal registers large on my Hollywood Richter scale of importance, the tech community doesn’t agree. Case in point is the lack of coverage on TechCrunch today (I dare you to find it, try seraching for “family guy” on TC) and the paucity of comments on Silicon Alley Insider, which focus incorrectly on Google’s apparent move into the media business vs. the failed Yahoo route (Yahoo financed their own demise shows, Google is merely a distributor here).

But while I’m convinced that this deal will move the market forward if for no other reason that it’s the first instance of contextual serving of premium video content of any significant scale, I’m a realist in for all practical purposes, what we have is a lucrative partnership of Found Money for the parties involved.

The concept is that Seth MacFarlane will create 50 short-form cartoon comedic bits that will be served in Youtube hosted video units on websites that have signed up for the AdSense program and have opted in to receive the Cavalcade content. The content will be contextual to the publisher site, meaning the site itself will fall into a Seth MacFarlane genre (comedy, animation, movies, TV, young-male demo, etc). That’s great because while the idea of serving contextual ads has been an over promised / under delivered value of the web for a while, the reality of serving contextual content is only recently being realized with data portability and now, this deal.

Let’s examine the players.

Media Rights Capital (MRC), the content financing group, run by Asif Satchu and Mordecai Wiczyk, with close ties to the talent agency, Endeavor, put up the financing for the Cavalcade shows. They get a shot at selling the embedded advertising and get a cut on every click paid out by the associated advertisers.

MacFarlane (an Endeavor client no less) creates the shows. He gets a cut of the ad revenue, but most importantly, gets to work free from FCC regulators whom he has called the “taste police.” He gets paid on the creative services work he does to help the advertisers animate their brand’s passion points.

The publisher website that has opted into AdSense (for a good example of what an AdSense video player looks like, click here), gets a slice of every click.

Google distributes the content, hosts the video, reports the performance metrics and gets a cut on every click. Massive scale bringing in pennies per click can add up pretty quickly. Hello Google ridiculous-waste-o’-money project.

So why didn’t this campaign launch last year when they first announced it in August of 2007? It did. The Raven Symone how-to video’s were syndicated across Adsense (click at your own risk) then ended up on her site, but Google hadn’t yet launched the skinnable Youtube player that would allow publishers to customize their AdSense video unit. That happened in October, right before the writer’s strike put everything digital into the Han Solo Carbonite freezer. The MacFarlane show was thankfully held back until the technology and the town were thawed and ready for consumption. Which apparently is now.

So what’s not to love?

It’s pretty genius actually, as long as the ads aren’t overly disruptive, which is debatable. The AdSense publisher network is, by definition, a group of sites with varied, niche content. They’re not video sites. Contextual video delivery on non-video sites works best as a marketing tool, to expose people to a new show and ultimately send them to a video site such as YouTube.

Take another look at the sample AdSense video here. You’ll notice you can’t blow it up to full screen. That would interfere with the publisher site’s code and design. But if I’m a Family Guy fan and I visit a website, let’s say a skateboard site, and I see the advertisement / video player with a Seth MacFarlane original content clip embedded in the site, I may click on it once, then watch the pre-roll ad or the what-have-you of overlays and banners. I may enjoy what I see in which case I’ll want to see another episode. Now I’m a fan so I’m going to search out the content in the best viewing experience possible. I want full screen. Youtube is a no brainer and anything in the AdSense network is hosted on Youtube. Now I’m watching the show on Youtube, still being served ads, but I’ve cut out the publisher site where I initially was first exposed to the content. Hey, they got some Found Money at no cost.

The best news is that with Google’s scale, there’s potential to create a new market for premium content. The challenge is that with Google’s scale, there’s no one to compete with them.

And that’s so Raven.