Here's another exciting YouTube initiative: film and video makers around the world can enter "Your Film Festival" beginning February 2 and have the chance to win $500,000 to work with Ridley Scott and top-notch producers on their next project.

Last year, MLB.com offered a chance for one lucky person to watch all 2,429 regular season games and attend All-Star and postseason games through a contest called MLB Dream Job.

Miss America is doing something a little different this year, and it involves online video .

Well, YouTube can't redesign every week, and they did that last week... so this week's online video news cycle belonged to some of the other players for once. We had several bits of rumor and speculation on the future of Netflix, Google Plus' beefed up Hangouts capabilities, Twitter's redesign which leaves a prominent place for branded video, and much more.

We spend so much time praising those great examples of quality branded video that it's easy to forget how much bad video is out there.

As users upload videos and share them with their friends, your video contest will form a viral loop and begin to naturally promote itself. Until then however, it’s worthwhile investing some time & effort in promoting your contest and in the first section of the ‘Promoting on a Budget’ chapter of this series, we will look at several ways you can use paid media to create awareness and drive traffic to your contest site. This post was made possible by Launchpad6 , an out of the box solution for creating video contests.

Contrary to popular belief, the best prizes aren’t always the one’s with the largest monetary value. There are other factors that impact whether a prize will be attractive to your audience.

Last week saw an unusual amount of big online video news stories.

The premise (or contest idea in layman's terms) is the most important ingredient in a successful video contest. If your contest idea appeals to your target market and content is readily available or easily created you have taken the first step to success

This post is the first in a seven-part series that looks at how to plan and execute a successful online video contest. We'll examine what separates the successful video contests from the unsuccessful one’s, and offer a road map marketers can use to help ensure a great contest