Brightcove, Metacafe offering new variations/extensions of the YouTube model.

Football Really - video powered by Metacafe

Honestly, I’ve never given much attention to soccer (football to the rest of the world) until I saw this amazing video from Metacafe. Holy smokes! I’ve been missing out!

My attention was brought to this site by posts in VentureBeat and TechDirt concerning how Metacafe is creating an entirely different kind of YouTube site by offering only human filtered, high quality content with no duplicates, no copyright violations and they even pay their contributors if their videos reach a certain level of popularity.

This isn’t exactly what I was talking about a couple of weeks back when I said that the YouTube/Google deal will truly validate the video site as a legitimate platform and business model, and that we can expect to see many different, highly differentiated YouTubes over the coming year.

Further evidence of this trend is found on CNET News today, where they report that Cambridge, MA based Brightcove is unveiling a suite of services that will make it easier for video producers to syndicate their content, generate revenues through advertising and sell clips of their videos to others. They are also unveiling a new video sharing site (like YouTube) that instead of aggregating content on one site, enables video producers to host content on their own site and then drive traffic to it.

So we’re seeing all sorts of twists and variations on the YouTube approach and at first glance, they seem to be improvements rather than imitations.

I’m still waiting for the ESPN/YouTube site, however…. I keep hoping they’ll open up and database that vast video offering they have in their vaults…