Sony introduced Crackle yesterday; it’s their overhaul of Grouper, a user-generated video site a la YouTube that Sony bought for $65 million last year. Crackle is now designed to offer not “amateur” web video, but the work of aspiring filmmakers and animators.

Farhad Manjoo at Salon pointed out yesterday that part of what Sony is offering is the benefits of its own diverse corporate assets:

The company is now leaning on what MBA-types might call “synergy.” Sony owns many entertainment properties — movie studios, record labels, a huge video game business — and can thus offer attractive rewards to creators looking for more than YouTube fame.

The rewards Crackle offers to filmmakers for uploading their videos include a potential pitch to Columbia Pictures, a two-day apprenticeship at Sony Imageworks Animation Lab, and a night performing on the stage of The Improv. As far as I can tell, Sony does not own any of The Improv, but is certainly in a position to negotiate sweet deals with partner organizations to assemble its rewards for its content providers, not unlike what they do for Survivor or Project Runway. User votes will decide who receives these rewards in various categories.
I just wanted to point this out; I suspect you will see more about Sony on this blog in the months
to come. What we’re seeing is a series of corporate players working out the viable economic and cultural positions they’re willing to occupy and their customers are willing to embrace, all amidst the shifting dynamics of digital culture: changes in the economics of information and distribution, current re-thinking of the evaluation of amateur and professional expertise, the appropriate relationship between culture and commerce. One viable intersection point seems to be the YouTube model: company makes possible the uploading of content and the maintenance of the community that forms around it; advertising is delivered alongside for the purposes of revenue. Another seems to be this contest model, where company hosts content loaded there in pursuit of rewards, viewers are offered both the content and the role in adjudicating the contest. Farhad’s observation is one reason why I think this is an appealing model to the Sony and the like: the contest can also deliver, dirt cheap, the cream of the crop into their entertainment / star system, and presumably on their terms — just like American Idol contestants winning exclusive but restrictive recording contracts with a Sony/BMG sub-label and a management contract with Simon Fuller’s 19 Entertainment. User-generated content also becomes a form of A&R, with user votes replacing the assessments of music label reps.
I think Sony is in an intriguing, though perhaps not unique, position in regards to these maneuvers — being a company that offers content and tools, hardware and software, computational technology and consumer electronics.