Search and Co-Opt

PodZinger says it's aiming for 90% accuracy in a few years. In the meantime, its basic plan "is a good one, an ingredient in an as-yet-unbaked economic cake," says John Battelle, author of The Search and chairman of Federated Media, a blog-publishing company based in California. "Everyone in the movie and television business wants an iTunes to happen but doesn't want Steve Jobs to control it." PodZinger offers "a new way to break-dance," Battelle says.

PodZinger has not yet signed up a major entertainment industry content partner--a Universal or Viacom--to try out this scheme, although it has a number of lesser-known customers. Eventually, though, the studios and networks will have to confront the wildfire proliferation of Web video. More than 110 million U.S. Internet users streamed almost 7 billion videos in August 2006, according to comScore. It's exploding not just at YouTube and TMZ, but also on news sites such as MarketWatch and the online editions of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Bloggers often double as "vloggers," MySpacers shoot and edit their own movie podcasts, and Dabble encourages its Dabblers to collect and organize their favorite flicks, which they can store online.

No one's going to control all that. But we can make sense of it. And smart companies might just profit from it.