User generated video (UGV) makes sense as part of an overall content play, but it shouldn't be the show itself. ABC is putting together an hour long show around user generated video, which could be enough to sour the mainstream media on UGC once and for all. Isn't a half hour of America's Home Videos torturing the concept enough?

UGV is like other community features such as chat, message boards and comments -- a great supplement to existing content, but not something that deserves the center ring. Even YouTube knows that it can't survive solely on amateur videos to draw enough of an audience.

Web publishers and advertisers use UGC to create contests and get individuals involved or to augment their own reporting. CNN's i-Report is a good idea for integrating UGV with professional content.

The biggest limitation on the growth of UGC is paying people to filter through the garbage to find the worthwhile shows. This is a new task for newspaper publishers and TV stations, and it reinforces why paying a professional is often worth it.

News portals enable readers to customize then home page to track their interests, and the "My" pages on Google, Yahoo, etc. have proven very popular. But when it comes to news video, there is a gaping hole.

CNN Headline News provides the "top" half hour of news on TV, but there is no equivalent online. CNN says it will no longer charge viewers to watch streams online, which should greatly increase traffic to the site.

I'd like to see (and you are with me, right?) a "My news page" where I can browse the videos of the top stories du jour and play them back in an order I specify. No video search engine today enables search of news headlines.

Video search engine Blinkx now is full of cash after a successful IPO, and the company has the best news video content available. Manually searching to find videos one by one on its site is unacceptable.

This is the video generation, and whomever can monetize news through video ads will be wildly successful. Just as TiVo freed us from the programmers schedule, someone should let us watch the news we want when and how we want.