As the LA Times reported today (along with approximately 169 other sources), MTV, MySpace, and Auditude are joining forces to develop a monetization strategy for streaming online videos. The process is quite straightforward – Auditude has indexed over one billion minutes of “professional” content, including 250 million videos and four years worth of television from 100 different channels. When a user uploads a video containing any of this content, the technology recognizes it. In turn, advertising is added to the video in one way or another, and the revenue can be shared between the content creator (i.e. the owner of the IP) and the distribution platform.

Auditude explains how their technology will work as follows:

The new platform will automatically identify any uploaded video clips from a number of shows produced by MTV Networks (including my personal favorite “The Daily Show”), and will display an overlay when the clip is played that shows which episode the clip originally came from, its original air-date, and links to online stores where users can buy the entire episode. In the past it has been nearly impossible to effectively monetize user-uploaded videos because they are typically tagged with such informative titles as “REally cool!” and “hilarious”. The Auditude platform ignores this information, relying solely on fingerprints taken from the clip’s audio and video data. These fingerprints are matched to prints in Auditude’s massive database, which spans over 250 million videos and 4 years of television content, all sorted by show and airdate.

As the LA Times article notes, this is a distinct improvement from the old mindset of Let’s sue YouTube (or other video distribution platform) and block this. In the words of Auditude CEO Vance Ikezoye:

“The first stage was clearly more focused on ‘How do I protect my content as a copyright holder and how do I keep from being sued as a site publisher? The stage we are entering now is much more about openness to try new business models to try to monetize the content.”

To quote Jeff Berman, the President of sales and marketing at MySpace:

“This is a game-changer. We’re going from a world of no to a world of yes while protecting the rights of the copyright holder.”

While I agree this is good progress towards a wikinomics enabled business model, it’s notable that the plans make no mention of sharing ad revenue with the individuals that upload the content – i.e. the prosumers. That would be the real game changer to me – while not suing people anymore is a nice start, giving prosumers an economic incentive to help distribute the content, particularly if they are adding value to it in some way (a mash up, for example), could unleas a wave of innovation. It also wouldn’t be that hard to do – it just involves a slightly different split of the revenue, mimicing what the likes of YouTube are already doing with “pure” user-generated content.