The Sports Page: NCAA Football Highlight Reels and Veoh

By Ben Homer • 08/19/2007 •

The NCAA has teamed with Veoh to offer a Custom Football Highlights application allowing free creation and syndication of user-created highlight reels. The application, taking clips from the NCAA’s centralized licensing organization Collegiate Images, will offer up-to-date footage for all major institutions. ###

This represents one of the most open stances toward online video syndication of any media rights holder. Because Collegiate Images controls the rights, they can distribute content to be broadcast on any network. And while Veoh will manage content syndication, fans control how content is used and where it goes.

As opposed to profit-driven professional sports that want maximum control of their content, college programs have different motivations. College sports may be big business but it’s also a way for institutions built on academics to increase awareness and prestige. Allowing fans to express their love for a college or university has inherent value of its own.

Highlights will be added twice weekly as short clips (most between 5 and 15 seconds) organized by conference, team, player, plays or schedule. Fans can then edit these as they wish using custom tool and share them where they like. My custom highlight reel (‘Big Hits!’) is below.

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The interface is not as complex as some other online video editing applications, and the process of building a reel could stand to be more intuitive, but the application is simple enough to use and reels are easy to distribute. Those expecting professionally edited reels should look elsewhere, but for the average fan looking to show game highlights to friends online, this is a big step in the right direction.

The NCAA and Veoh have created a vehicle for fans to experience their teams on their terms. Few have offered fans this much freedom and, as a result, we can look forward to a lot more college sports all over the web.

Ben Homer is a contributing writer from Online Video Watch.