The “Scoop” for 2007: The Customer will be Video Producer -- Empowered with New Video Sharing Tools, Legions of Companies and Media Publishers Will Feature User Generated Video

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How cool is this? A new marketing site for Haagen-Dazs ice cream has a promotion going on, inviting  ice cream lovers with video cams to upload their own ice cream recipes to the page. The New York Times regional paper in South Carolina, the Spartanburg Herald Journal, is asking readers to upload videos of readers singing Christmas carols.

Companies and organizations of all sizes will soon manage video content developed by their audiences. This will be an inevitable trend in the new year. It will be a powerful way to engage customers and other key constituents. For smart media companies, it will be a way to build audiences and increase available of inventory for online video advertising.

Will legions of video makers upload to corporate sites rather than YouTube and other popular video sharing sites? I’m not sure when, and there will certainly be some false starts, but it’s going to happen.

One of the companies on the forefront of empowering companies to manage and stream video is Brightcove. The company is providing video services to many major publishers including The Washington Post Company, The New York Times and Dow Jones.

Earlier this month, Brightcove released tools to its corporate customers to allow consumer-generated video on their sites. Founder Jeremy Allaire shares his thoughts on this developments his company's role.

Below is a demonstration of how publishers can use this tool for gathering community-generated video.

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-- Andy Plesser

Brightcove, Jeremy Allaire, Video Content