In the wake of continued video deals in this awful economy

I'll be back at the University of Missouri Journalism School this week to discuss how faculty and students can use some of the emerging video companies I've advising in class publishing activities and research.

For example:

* Swarmcast has its technology in beta with Major League Baseball and should go live next season. The technology improves MLBs video quality by more than 4x and will help MLB to cost contain its projected surge in bandwidth expenses with the higher quality video and increasing number of subscribers to its online services. In addtion, Swarmcast, now backed by major Japanese financial and media companies, has signed a deal to embed the technology in next generation consumer electronics devices from a major brand.

* Magnify Media, where I am an advisor, has just launched its user shared/generated video platform with dozens of small Web communities and will be launching with several major media brands within weeks. I looked at all of these deals, including YouTube, at Best Buy, and I like Magnify the best because it is so simple for an existing Web community to implement. Most importantly, a Web community invites its viewers to search for and rate relevant videos at YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo, etc. and the Magnify platform then shares these videos hosted by the other sites within its clients' Web communities, while compiling the deepest database of user meta data on special interest communities on the Web.