I've been trying to avoid the whole Yahoo! Video thing - kind of an obvious target - but today's Wall Street Journal article on Time Warner's revived split up plans (premium) makes for an interesting compare and contrast with other major media companies' doings of late. The WSJ article highlights a slap-down of Sports Illustrated's proposal to integrate its content into AOL to provide them with a branded sports portal. AOL's reason: SI has nothing to offer us. Translation: we're over subsidized brand aggregation. Either a brand stands in the eyes of an audience or it doesn't. The real brand is the audience itself and their focus on the context that an online publisher creates in increasingly agnostic formats.

Why didn't "synergies" work? Bad timing, for one, given the explosive growth of online content, but one must also factor in the growth of content aggregated from non-traditional media sources and the proliferation of outlets for potentially synergistic content. Simply put, there's just too much interesting stuff out there for consumers to make managing the short end of the content tail in a proprietary environment your primary aggregation strategy. Even enterprise-oriented companies such as Reed Elsevier, Thomson and Reuters are seeing this strategy fray at its edges.

So on to Yahoo! Video. It makes oh so many of the right moves. Well-designed interface, easy to use search and navigation features, incorporates user-driven feedback for ranking clips and show, user-driven tagging, a virtual aggregation scheme, a "featured" section that highlights key choices, tons of mainstream video content, an ideal environment for brand advertisers...and it misses the point. It's all about mainstream media,, in spite of user-generated packaging. When I look at the "popular" section you get only one page of video listings - with no paging to other selections. The number of video selections on this page adds up to thirteen - the number of TV stations on old U.S. VHF broadcast TV tuners. Yahoo! Video is a masterful execution of mainstream online media strategy, as is much of Yahoo!'s offerings.

Yahoo is everything that AOL should have tried to be (and may yet become), the best agnostic sourcing of mainstream content combined with the best of online content that blends with mainstream in a way that doesn't upset advertisers coming over to online from traditional broadcast, cable and print media. But at the end of the day, Yahoo! seems to be largely of the mind that the Long Tail of content is just garnish on top of a traditional media steak. Get user-generated content, yes - but throw it against a relatively safe set of content that reinforces traditional marketing schemes. Be it through aggregation or acquisition, Yahoo! Video is a fine demonstration of everything that a hit-driven strategy should try to be. It's McContent for those who rarely venture away from the hits, American Idol for mouse potatoes.

By contrast there is, of course, Google Video. You can get all sorts of mainstream content if you want, some of it for a premium price. Popular stuff is not limited to a handful of choices but extends down to the top 100 videos and beyond. Almost all of popular sources are born-on-the-Web footage. Random selections are featured on the home page to encourage exploration and new experiences. And search results are notably different in their contextualization. Type in a search for "9/11" on Yahoo! Video and you get lots of mainstream media footage on the Moussaoui trial. Type in a search for "9/11" on Google Video and you get the popular online documentary "Loose Change" and other web-grown video presentations presenting conspiracy theories about the events of that day. Dangerous stuff, not the kind of content that's going to attract national brand advertisers - but compelling community-driven content.

Google is, and remains, a service that is all about exposing both the best of mainstream media sources in competition with the best of long tail sources, leaving it up to audiences to determine which sources work best for them wherever possible. If it's a little open-ended and challenging for those looking for closed and simple solutions, audiences know who's next door. Congratulations to Yahoo! for a very well thought-through online video product - and congratulations to Google for a video product that challenges us to think about our choices.