Business - Written Monday, November 3, 2008 by Denis Hancock - 2 Comments

MySpace and MTV’s video monetization strategy: why can’t prosumers get a share?

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.

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