User created video sharing site Revver has landed an intriguing partnership with a new UK TV station called FameTV. Revver users will be able to opt-in for TV broadcast and those selected will be shown on FameTV. Viewers will vote for their favorites by SMS and revenue sent to Revver will be split 50/50 with the video publishers.
This is the kind of partnership we’ve seen fomenting in previous deals like PodShow’s Sirius broadcasts, the podcast fueled radio station KYOU and Rocketboom on Tivo.
Revver is very 2.0, with post roll still frame ads, revenue splits for publishers, social bookmarking integration and an API. Unfortunately, they’ve had a tough time building the kind of critical mass that YouTube has. Aside from a handful of high profile video series (Ze Frank, Ask a Ninja, Lonelygirl15) there’s not a lot of good content on the network. Perhaps it’s the revenue sharing that brings less authentically creative and more profit driven amateurs to make up the bulk of the content at Revver. I don’t know. A TV partnership may or may not help.
This kind of partnership is in some key ways different from the trend of paying top users. It may be more effective in terms of quality to glean a select few content creators and pay them well than to skim from a large set of content and pay many people only a little. Blogburst (our coverage) appears to be taking the à la carte approach for text content.
Only time will tell which approach will work best. For now though, classic British comedy will face challengers at least larger in number than ever before.