Really good story at Beet.TV about the AP Online Video Network beta that we're participating in at Knoxville News Sentinel along with a number of other papers. Give the piece a read (and watch the video above). It's the best overview of the efforts that I've seen.
At the very least, the ability to upload local videos provides sites who are already using the AP Online Video Network a unified player for all video with ad avail spots.
Whether the AP project is the answer is yet to be determined, but the news organization and its partner Microsoft have a very rich set of tools they are pushing out to their members.
(Andy Plesser has a very interesting blog if you haven't checked it out.)
Tags: video | Travel | newspapers
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But will they allow others to embed the videos on their sites? Or upload video to the stream and participate in things? (doubtful on that last one)
While I'm glad to see AP working on video content, I'd actually have rather seen them do something through YouTube or Google Video with some social features available.
I'm hopeful they will. Not initially, but later. The roadmap is there. Microsoft already has its Soapbox. So it shouldn't be a technological hurdle. Of course, we could screw it up.