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As local media sites  continue to look for ways to create and sell low cost high quality video to small businesses one contender is  Spotmixer.  The product is simple enough, a set of 200 video advertising templates by industry, that media can  customize with voice overs, text, music, photos, mood and pacing by following a wizard (or use SpotMixer’s experts for a fee).I spoke with Leslie Latham, Vice President of Business Development just after she signed up Comcast Spotlight in San Francisco.

“Television stations are killing  themselves to find revenues. Many of them have been leaving money on the table for years because local has gone unsold,”  she said.

“We say two things: Heh your local operations (stations or cable ) are being squeezed because the production staff  has shrunk, and your local sales staff is crying out for more ways to get more local ad revenues. …We are a super -cost effective tool to help the production team and create a competitive benefit to offer advertisers.”

A little history here:   The division was created as a division of One True Media in 2005 as a consumer service aimed at “making video production available to everyone”.  Today 3000 consumers using the service every day for quickie home movies.

“We discovered a year or so ago that a lot of people were using the service to create videos for their businesses,” Latham said. ” So we looked at the requirements …and changed the service for small businesses and media companies. It’s actually easy to use than it is for a consumer.”

SpotMixer has also added output options to post video ads to Facebook,  YouTube and other options.

Like Mixpo, SpotMixer is targetting broadcast companies first.  “The wonderful silver lining in local broadcast and tv because the prices have come down. For small businesses  the cost of tv  used to be out of reach. These guys are  now going after very small buys with $500 to $600 minimums.  Customers  can create that tv spot for $149, in a way that looks very very  professional.”

Unlike Mixpo, which focused primarily  converting cable advertisers businesses that already had video ads to online formats,  SpotMixer is helping stations develop new, smaller businesses by creating ads from scratch, which can be output to boradcast and online campaigns.

Claims the service is cheap and simple enough  that it is being used to create spec ads.  Unlike Mixpo, however, the ads don’t have conversion tool overlays.

The cost ranges from $149 to $400 per campaign depending on whether the clients need Spot Mixer to ad services, and  Spotmixer is negotiating prices with media companies to bring the cost down.

So far SpotMixer has signed up both Cox and TimeWarner, and has deals with SuperBook and the Yellow Pages. But the service is also a good choice  for newspaper sites who need to find easy ways to sell video online.

Everyscape, a provider of software that creates interactive panoramic video tours, called “webscapes” has an interesting play for local media companies. So far the company has partnered mostly with merchant associations using its own sales force to sign up the merchants. But there is no reason media companies can’t do the same thing, obtaining video content for  “experiential” guides like dining and nightlife, or for hyperlocal communities. 

For a quick walk-through go to  Harvardsquare.com and click on Maps and Directions. From there you can click on Eye level Tour and pick from the featured businesses, all of which have a paid  “webscape” that lets you enter their building and look around by holding your cursor on the arrows.

A simple webscape, ie one single 360 shot, sells for $400 a year,  and some customers buy more if they need to, say feature two rooms such as the dining room and the bar. Not a lot of money, but a great cheap way to create video. Keep in mind this could just be part of a great landing page, and a data-collection program.

Here’s a shot of what it looks like:

In Boston where the company is headquartered, Everscape has a sales force. So it partners with the merchants association and  sells all the ads, keeping the revenues. They also  maintain  sales force in San Francisco.

For local media sites the partnership  is revenue share based and can be used to set up verticals such as restaurant guides, or create hyperlocal hubs such as a guide to the clubbing district or other “mini-downtowns”.  The webscapes can also be imbedded in other directory products, and the advertiser also appears on the Everscape site.  The Boston Phoenix has used the guide for StuffBoston.com and New Hampshire Magazine is also selling it as part of a restaurant guide.

StuffBoston.com  places the webscapes on restaurants in the “Find a restaurant” by neighborhood search results. The restaurant lisings have an additional “Look Around” button:

Everyscape, who does not give exclusives to its partners by market,  apparently is on the verge of a partnership with a large directory company that will allow it to sell national ads across the platform by December.

Everyscape was founded in  2002 as a portal called  Supertour, focused on the hospitality industry by providing online experiential tours of hotels and other destination. It rebranded as Everyscape in 2007.   “We are in the business of recreating the real world online, ” says Rebecca MacQuerrie, director of marketing.

New clients in California including the San Carlos Chamber of Commerce,  Sausolita Chamber of Commerce, and San Mateo downtown association, who put the Everscape map on their  and give introductions to members.  No reason why a local media company couldn’t make the same arrangement with merchant associations in hyper-local areas of town, especially since the videos are easier to create than interviews or commercials.

“Best of” contests gain new life online when media companies partner with Web-savvy  CityVoter, a site that let’s visitors vote for their favorite establishments. So far mostly broadcast sites with no established “Best of” brand have taken advantage of the opportunity. “TV is a no-brainer. Its like a megaphone,” says Joshua Walker, founder and CEO. “I’m still looking for the print that can activate as well as TV.   Print companies tend to get caught up in Church and State issues.”   According to the Kelsey Group about half of the traffic from contests comes from the media, the other half comes through the  CityVoter site.

“A new niche we are carving out is all the magazines  across the country,”  Walker says. The San Francisco Chronicle and Boston College’s student newspaper also currently use the software.

“Best of” contests in which readers for for their favorite establishments are  a staple for local media companies,  who publish reviewed compilations of readers and/or editors picks  in fat “go to guides”.  Plus it is an easy advertising sell. So major markets can have as many as a dozen local media picking the “Best of” the city and magazines are also catching on. Like holiday season is for retailers, the annual “Best of” brand has become a critical revenue source for many small publishers.

But  “Best of” guides have become so competitive that companies in common  categories like restaurants often have awards from several media hanging on the wall and media companies have trouble spicing up the contest year in, year out.

Enter CityVoter.com.  Since launching five years ago, the company  now powers contests in 28 markets, from broadcast “start ups” - a zero to sixty advertising joyride -  to newspaper sites and corporate brands. Still new to most cities, CityVoter has re-energized the “best of” brand online, giving its exclusive partners a competitive edge and threatening to dislodge some phone book sized brand leaders in the online space.

What’s new about CityVoter’s  technology?  Most online “Best of” sites are copies of the printed paper, with online voting as a  secondary method of collecting votes, in addition to a survey in the paper or magazine.  Because online voting is cheaper and easier to do (paper surveys take up a full page for eight weeks then a group of people has to sit around and tally the votes in 60 to 100 categories) many newspaper  have already dropped their printed survey forms.

CityVoter  has the advantage of starting from scratch; and one innovation is adding massive amounts of  user-generated content.

“We ask voters why are you recommending this company?  About 50% actually take the time to to write something about the business, and that creates a new comment, and aggregated, an enormous amount of content.  We have about 80,000 of these recommendations per city,” says Josh Walker, founder and CEO of CityVoter. “The SEO is incredible. UG content is what Yahoo and Google are looking for.”

In a period of two months from voting through results,  some media sites  generate up to 5 million new page views from their annual readers poll, Walker told me. Then the content resides on the site year round, in addition to being aggregated on the Cityvoter.com site.  Media also participate in a question-answer network ( “Need a recommendation? Ask a question” box goes on the front of channel), receie T-shirts and other shwag, and have access to a ballooning email list of voters.

Some of the biggest CityVoter contest markets are Detroit, Sacremento and Seattle, cities that have partnered for several years and now have 100,000 to 140,000 votes generated in the space of two months. Offshoot contests abound,  such as  Detroit’s WDIV TV’s “The Best Holiday Gift Guide, Created by You.” And  brand contests, such as ExerciseTV,  which had a “Best of” contest for local personal trainers, building a site with more than 1500 trainers.

The contests CityVoter powers typically generate six figure revenues and cost between $10,000 to $20,000, although  in  small markets Walker says he has sold the program for as little as $500 to $1000 a month with participation in the revenue share.  Originally CityVoter took a revenue share of advertising in all its partnership agreements.  But since advertising revenue shares are “difficult to police”, the company has switched its model to “inventory share”, taking a percentage of the inventory and selling  these premium spots through Quandrant One and Burst Media. There is also a small self-serve feature that charges a fee to small businesses who build their own micro-sites.

Walker says the five year old company now has 12 employees and is venture capital backed.  “We are on track to  break-even,  even heading for a profit in Q1.”

With 28 markets under their belt, CityVoter.com has a vast uncharted market ahead.

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