Online video sports syndicator CineSport has announced its biggest content and technology partnership to date, with USA TODAY Sports Media Group, a top 5 comScore sports property with 30 million monthly unique visitors. USA TODAY Sports operates the sports section of USAToday.com, plus the sports sections of 140 local newspaper/broadcast TV station sites, a network of digital-only sports sites and a network of 60 affiliates.

Under the deal, USA TODAY Sports will integrate CineSport's VaMP video platform technology throughout its content network. As a result, new and archived original video will be accessible for local producers to easily embed in digital articles. Gregg Winik, CineSport's CEO, noted that these types of contextual embeds are key to CineSport and how it helps its publisher partners differentiate themselves beyond simply displaying video clips in the right column of site pages.

In addition to the technology integration, Gregg said that the partnership will extend CineSport's original video efforts to include appearances by reporters from USA TODAY and its related properties. These types of interviews with veteran local beat reporters have been a mainstay of CineSport's original video programming. They allow the local news outlet to contextually include the video and also for the video to be available to OTHER properties for contextual embed, creating a network effect.

The CineSport-USA TODAY Sports partnership is another great example of the Syndicated Video Economy ("SVE") that I have long been talking about. In the SVE, content providers seek to distribute video across networks of sites, rather than being solely focused on driving traffic to their own destination site. The SVE approach is a successful way to gain audience and scale, both key factors to driving an ad-only revenue model. As with its other SVE deals, Gregg said the USA Today Sports partnership is based on ad revenue sharing, with each party having rights to certain level of inventory.