If you have a site that has a video player – the chances are that you will have heard of the JW Players. There are versions for wmv or flv and a desktop variant is available too. They are known and loved by many people in the industry for their low cost, easy to implement and easy to customise nature. As someone once described them to me ‘they’re like Wordpress for video’. As such they have been used by thousands of sites.

The success of the player is great but what I think is really interesting is the potential value of this installed base. This is where the Longtail network comes in. If you have an installed player on thousands of sites then the potential for advertising around the video content is considerable. Many of the sites will be incredibly narrow in focus which doesn’t hold much interest for a large advertiser who only cares about the mass market but for a niche advertiser who really wants to hit a target market then this could pay dividends.

Through using the Longtail AdSolution a site can embed a tag from any network or adserver into their player thus opening up the video on their site to advertisers, all this with a self-serve reporting and management system. It sounds good and reports are that it is good. In the UK Longtail are partnered with a couple of different ad networks – Adconion and Adpepper but the system will take tags from Tremor, YuMe, DoubleClick In-Stream and others.

For people with video-heavy sites the prospect of earning some ad-funds from the content is very attractive and this should be possible as long as the advertisers can find the audiences that they want as often as they want.