On April 23, Yahoo Movies plans to launch a microsite where aspiring filmmakers can submit original movie shorts parodying films from the past year for consideration in a new user-generated category, "Best Movie Spoof." The winner will then be announced during MTV's live June 3 broadcast, which Mark Burnett is producing.

"The ability to create and interact with user-generated content is so important to today's audience that this show simply had to include UGC as a major element in the creative experience," said Mark Burnett.

In addition to the movie spoof award, MTV, Yahoo and Burnett are developing a section on the site where viewers can comment on the user-generated submissions, as well as post photos and videos. Content from the site will then be integrated into the live broadcast on a "World Wide Web Wall."

MTV and Yahoo are betting on the user-generated content to boost traffic to their sites.

Last year, Music Award-related traffic to MTV surpassed 2 million streams--up over 50% from the year before.

On the "MTV Movie Awards on Yahoo" site, each award category will be featured and fans can then vote on MTV.com for their favorites in MTV's categories including "Best Kiss" and "Best Villain." Also, as MTV announces nominees and performers, fans can look to Yahoo Movies for the news.

Without the help of Yahoo's audience, MTV's online strategy is seeing some success, according to new usage numbers released on Monday. MTV.com attracted a record 84 million streams in January--up 258% year-over-year, and then 85.1 million in February--up 228% year-over-year, the company reported.

Helping fuel the streams were the number of unique visitors going to the site. In January, MTV.com attracted 24.2 million unique visitors, an all-time-high and a 56% increase over January 2006. In February, the number of daily unique visitors grew another 10% to 1.1 million a day--up from 1 million a day in January.

On the mobile handsets, meanwhile, music and original-made-for-mobile programming helped MTV Mobile reach 1 million streams per month in December and January.

This news story is important. I recommend that everyone read it.