The Video Advertising Pie Just Shrunk

Barack Obama followed the presidential candidate online video trend by announcing his run with an embeddable video courtesy of (the freshly funded) Brightcove — that video is now embedded and playing on dozens of sites (including now this one) — FOR FREE.

Media companies have long depended on the ever growing bucket of money that gets poured into political campaign ads — especially presidential campaigns.

Well, that bucket just sprung a leak.

Candidates embracing the embeddable online video technology is trivial — it’s just one big bandwagon.

But the economic implications for media — and everyone frothing over online video advertising — are far from trivial. See that dollar of TV political advertising? It ain’t gonna be a dollar when it comes online.

Now that’s real campaign finance reform.