Putting Content In The Hands Of The Viewer

The BBC reports of two interesting announcements today.

Viacom, owner of many TV shows including MTV's Pimp My Ride will allow web users to embed clips of their shows into their own web sites. Previously sites such as YouTube have been requested to remove such content, but in a change of strategy, Viacom wants to encourage users to embed cips into their sites, and eventually reduce the reliance on YouTube as a means to view clips.

Making content available and as easy to share as possible will start to exploit the public word of mouth as a media, rather than relying on more traditional means of distributing content.
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Vodaphone has also just announced a service to allow people to update and manage their YouTube accounts via their moble phones. I predict a strong increase in video blogging and that in the not too distant future that it will be standard practice to document and share video and images taken on mobile devices, and share them via services as Youtube and Flickr.
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