Publishers are starting to notice that too, and are increasingly turning to the startup to make some of their own imagery and video content more visually appealing and browsing it, well, downright sexy.

Latest premium publisher to join the fray: CBS Interactive’s TV.com, one of the premier websites bringing episode guides, news, reviews, interviews, TV listings, and more to a primarily U.S. audience, is now using Cooliris technology to enhance its ‘Shows’ section.

If you’re not familiar with Cooliris and the Flash-based Embed Wall product that TV.com is now using for its website, go check it out on there or head straight to the Cooliris website to learn more. My guess is you won’t be disappointed, neither as a user or as a publisher.

Backed with about $18.5 million in VC funding, Palo Alto, CA-based Cooliris has also debuted an interesting way to generate advertising revenue with its service.

And with deals like this one with TV.com parent company CBS Interactive, more and more people will grow familiar with Cooliris products, which in turn will make them more interesting for publishers to add, and advertisers to promote their wares on.

Can’t help but root for this one – although I also can’t help but think they’re a bit over-funded.

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Today, the VC-backed startup is introducing what was always in the cards for them if they were ever going to make money off its innovative product: a Publisher Network that integrates non-intrusive interactive advertising units into embeddable 3D walls.

You can already see the new advertising solution in action thanks to a partnership Cooliris has sealed with marketing agency OMD and one of its historical big clients, Infiniti. Basically, Cooliris will be integrating custom blocks for the Infiniti G Convertible ad campaign into streaming photo walls throughout its freshly launched publisher network, more specifically on popular websites like Yahoo! News, Golf.com, the New York Magazine and Style.com. See it in full effect at this section of the New York Magazine website or just have a look at the screenshot below to get an idea of where the company is going with this.

Personally, I’m a big fan of Cooliris and the way they are going about trying to generate revenue from its product. In the past, we’ve talked about other innovative advertising strategies we actually appreciate, and I think this is what should be drawing the attention of The Online Publishers Association. Maybe that way they will finally realize that just making display ads units bigger isn’t going to solve any of their members’ problems without annoying the heck out of their respective website visitors.

Cooliris on Yahoo! News Photos

Embedded 3D Wall (doesn’t work so well in Firefox for some reason)

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To use PicLens, a user clicks a small translucent icon that appears atop the image of interest once the plugin is installed. The PicLens slideshow interface appears and the user can move from one photo to the next or press play and enjoy the show. A user can intuitively browse images within search results, photo albums, and Media RSS enabled websites.

Support is currently provided for Flickr, Facebook, Friendster, Picasa Web Album and image search results from Google and Yahoo. Site owners can add support to any site with photos by including Media RSS support.

The best way to describe PicLens is that it’s a like the slideshow feature in Picasa or a similar photo viewing tool, but applied to web pages. The full screen rendering does require a decent internet speed when displaying large photographs, but visually the results are stunning. This Firefox plugin is going to find a lot of fans very, very quickly.

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While other services perform this function for Firefox and Google search results, the new Cooliris Safari plug-in offers previews of links in Google (Web, Images, News, Groups, Froogle), BBC News, CNN News, Craigslist, eBay, Del.icio.us and RSS feeds. The company’s primary competitor is Browster.

In other Mac friendly news, web messaging platform Meetro will launch a Mac version tonight as well. See also previous TechCrunch coverage of Meetro.

Browster CEO Scott Milener wrote about Cooliris and other competitors on the Browster blog, using it as an opportunity to announce that Browster still has a few tricks up its sleave. My previous posts on Browster are here.