IP Democracy: MTV, Veoh Push Video Syndication Across the Web

The Internet is chock-full of video but only a few video-sharing sites make it easy for the videos to proliferate across the Internet. Two companies making news today are looking to spur greater syndication of video content across the web.

First, MTV, fresh from its parent company Viacom’s demands that YouTube yank 100,000 videos from its inventory, is increasingly allowing people to take videos from Viacom-owned web sites and publish them on their own pages.

“We need to open up our websites and content both for consumers and for other companies,” said Mika Salmi, MTV Networks president of global digital media.

This stepped-up interest in spreading MTV Networks video across the web is a strategy that the company hopes will help pump up the company’s transition to the Internet era. Although the cable channels that come under the MTV Networks’ umbrella are the most profitable part of the Viacom empire, Viacom’s stock has been in the doldrums, leading to 250 staff layoffs at MTV Networks, announced yesterday.

Meanwhile, video sharing company Veoh is launching today a web syndication service that uses P2P technology to allow users to syndicate DVD-quality video. Content creators that upload their videos to Veoh can then syndicate them to web sites, feeds or even iPods.

CEO Dmitry Shapiro (who is speaking at our conference, The New Video Summit) calls the new service, in combination with Veoh’s virtual digital video recording service, a “virtual cable operator.” Although off to a slow start, Veoh seems to be picking up steam. The company, backed by $12.5 million in venture funding from Michael Eisner, Time Warner and others, recently announced a deal with US Weekly to create a celebrity news channel and has a pact with top Hollywood talent agency UTA (UTA’s Brent Weinstein is also speaking at The New Video Summit) to create an audition channel for aspiring filmmakers and actors.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on February 13, 2007 8:59 AM to IP Democracy