Warner Music Group is announcing a deal with the Internet video provider Brightcove today that will spread Warner's video content around the web in a free, ad-supported format. Brightcove is supplying an embeddable player that will let anyone grab the videos and repost them to other sites. That sounds a lot like YouTube, and in fact the pair struck a deal back in September that put WMG's music videos on YouTube for free.
The specifics of the deal are that videos from Warner Music Group’s Sire, Atlantic, and Elektra labels, plus individual artists, will appear on Warner's sites. They'll supply performances, interviews and music videos for free and take a cut of the ad revenue. Even better, the clips will be embeddable on MySpace, blogs and other social networks (hi5, Piczo). What's not so clear is how (or if) this intersects with the YouTube deal: perhaps Warner just want to experiment with freeing up their content, and don't want to be entirely dependent on YouTube to serve their needs.