Tribune launches video site

Good news, bad news this morning. The good news? A new Chicago-centric You-Tube-style video site called Chicagolive.com has launched. The bad news is that it's mainly just re-branded content from the Chicago Tribune's various media arms. At least for now.

Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with the Trib's video content, of course. It's just that I tend to watch it on the sites where it originates, and in context, too. To be fair, there's also some content from MySpace and Google, and the user-submitted videos will probably starting showing up after the site gets more notice. But for now it's hard to see it as anything more than a way for the Trib to sell more ads online. I'm also wondering how NBC-5 and CBS-2 will react when they realize that they're indirectly helping the Trib's bottom line.

The other problem here is that Chicagolive.com tends to take the "user" out of the phrase "user-generated content": There's no way to create your own channel; no embedding code is provided; you're required to e-mail the site owners to remove a video you submitted, and there's an "approval" process in place for anything you upload. So while it's technically still a community-driven site, it's more like a gated community.