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Motor Trends, Others Take Advantage of New Video Platforms

Primedia is taking its Motor Trend magazine into broadcast TV, creating a service that can be carried by broadcast stations’s secondary digital channels, writes Broadcasting & Cable. Motor Trend TV should be ready to launch in early 2007. Programming will be free to stations; affiliates will receive local commercial inventory and will have the option of inserting locally produced auto-related programming.

Multicast Network Group is helping Primedia with programming and distribution for the service, which will offer auto-themed programming such as car makeover shows, movies and new product reviews.

The move is part of a mini-trend among niche publishers that are using new video platforms to extend their brands, according to Mediapost. New magazine Make, for example, is making a similar transition to video via YouTube, offering its Maker’s Faire video clips - longer than YouTube users are normally allowed - available on the popular video sharing site. Make’s deal with YouTube is possible through YouTube’s Director’s Program, which gives the magazine publisher links leading back to the website and integration of brand graphics.

YouTube is becoming popular among advertisers; it and similar services such as Google Video are so inexpensive compared to establishing a proprietary streaming video website that Make’s associate editor Phil Torrone predicts these platforms will be the wave of the future for small content providers such as print magazine publishers.

He added that there are major quality differences in the video market, saying that with Google Video, it took “weeks and weeks and weeks” for videos that he uploaded to go live.