Syndicaster Adds AOL, Brightcove, And YouTube Distribution For Local TV News Clips

Continuing its quest to bridge the world’s of broadcast television and the Web, Syndicaster is adding several online distribution options for local TV stations, including the ability to publish video clips to YouTube, AOL (via Brightcove), Yahoo and other sites. Syndicaster is an online editing and video-clip management service that allows TV stations to any broadcast news clip and repurpose it for the Web by publishing it to their own Websites or through its sister service ClipSyndicate (both Syndicaster and ClipSyndicate are divisions of Critical Media).

Now Syndicaster is adding one-click distribution options to the major video sites so that local TV affiliates or station groups can post their videos to AOL Money & Finance or their YouTube channel, and manage it all from one place. One feature that TV customers will appreciate is the ability to set embargo windows for each service, allowing a TV station to publish hot news immediately to its own site, then 24 or 36 hours later to video partner sites where it makes the most money, and then maybe finally to YouTube.

Syndicaster has also recently added an on-location feature which allows TV reporters and crews to upload clips directly from wherever they are capturing the footage, and making that footage available as Web video clips even if it never gets airtime. Affiliated stations can also go to Syndicaster to find footage and use it either on the Web or on-air, depending on their arrangements with each other. When that airplane crashed in Buffalo, NY recently, a local station put all of its footage on Syndicaster, and other affiliated stations around the country used it to grab video footage for their own on-air reports.

Syndicaster charges a flat subscription fee of about $850 a month per TV station or news organization. With 60 paying customers, that comes to about $50,000 a month a few months after launch, with a lot of runway for growth. Syndicaster is exploring ways to bring its online editing and video distribution platform to consumers, but so far it is stumped in that area. CEO Sean Morgan admits:

Look, I don’t know how to make money on the consumer. I’d like to make money on this. We are getting great traction from broadcasters. Bringing it to newspapers is obviously the next path forward.

In May, the company plans to expand its reach to newspaper sites with Syndicaster for Newspapers. As news organizations of all stripes make video a bigger component of their online offerings, Syndicaster is hoping to become the industry standard for ingesting, editing, and distributing these videos. Maybe the A.P. should look into it.