Web publishers will soon be able to receive syndicated video programming on a daily basis that is contextually relevant to their site's content.

Penn Media announced this week the launch of its newest service, Vidsense, which allows the distribution of streaming video content through any Web site via the use of a video player that can be directly embedded onto standard Web pages.

The service works like Google AdSense, scoping the content of the page to determine which video clips are most appropriate and relevant to it.

Vidsense streams video programming in a number of popular categories, ranging from Humor and Entertainment to News, History, Music, Bizarre, Politics, Science Fiction, Nature, Religion, Spirituality, Sports, Historical speeches and Old comedy, extracted from a growing video library already hosting over 100,000 hours of clips.

The service has been designed to appeal to small, independent online publishers, news sites, bloggers and anyone else who cannot afford to license traditional video content or is scared to do it due to the exorbitant costs of hosting and distributing large media files.

To enable Vidsense on a web site the publisher needs only to insert a snippet of code inside the pages where she wants to display contextual video clips.

The business model adopted by Vidsense foresees the use of 15-to-30 commercials, a ugly, intrusive and flow-breaking approach that tries to carry over traditional mass media advertising approaches to the new media avenues available online.

For effective monetization of contextual video clips like this it is much more effective, ethical and appealing to the reader to have a visual sponsorship of the video player area with possibly a text-based contextually-relevant ad being displayed there. Better yet, the sponsorship of a "premium" section at the end of the clip that provides more in-depth info, links and reference info about the issue covered, the subject showcased and the opportunity to buy, rent, download more of the same content from an online commercial provider may be the ideal way to go for now.

Vidsense provides also the means for the online independent publisher to create an income stream around the publication of contextually relevant video clips, by splitting the advertising money collected with the publishers themselves.

Here you can get some idea of the type of content that Vidsense will be initially distributing.

As mentioned, Vidsense matches the content it streams with the content of your site, so that if you have a comedy website, Vidsense would serve comedy clips some popular US comedians.

Vidsense picks up the cost of hosting, streaming and licensing all of the video content that it distributes to independent publishers, plus the cost of finding the relevant and complementary advertisers that make this operation profitable.

Here is a sample of the Vidsense™ video player that can be embedded on any Web page.

Unfortunately the selection of video content presently available leaves much to be desired, as small independent publishers often prefer to cover niche, highly focused topics rather than mainstream media generic and broad categories.

Content seems to be very slanted to US sources, and the fact that the small publishers cannot directly select the exact video content to be streamed may significantly limit Vidsense potential.

Vidsense is not terribly significant for the premiere service it starts offering but rather because it points our attention to the rapid and sweeping switch that we will be seeing in the coming months happen to the universe of TV and film online distribution.

Stay tuned.