• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, November 1, 2007

Bucking nearly every trend in online media today, Best Buy this week launched a closed and paid service for consumers to share uploaded video online. The big-box retail chain plans to market the service online and in its retail stores.

As an extension of its digital music store, subscriptions to Best Buy Video Sharing start at $6.97 for 100 minutes of video hosting and video lengths up to 30 minutes each. There are also premium plans available for extended video lengths, additional video storage capacity, and other sharing features.

Powering the service is a U.K. startup named Mydeo. Best Buy also announced that it is taking a minority equity stake in Mydeo. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The recent explosion in online video sharing can be attributed to several factors, including shrinking data storage costs, national broadband penetration, and the emergence of free and user-friendly sites like YouTube.

Still, with all the video-sharing options available today, Best Buy has "actually seen an increase in customer demand for alternative video-sharing solutions," according to Kevin Winneroski, vice president of the company.

At issue, said Winneroski, is consumer security. "Many customers, particularly families with children, don't want their personal memories available for anyone to see in the public domain," he said. "Customers can safely store their videos and share them only with the friends and family they choose."

But, while the Best Buy video-sharing service touts its ability to control a video's exposure, YouTube and other video-sharing services already offer such controls for free.

Winneroski is also promoting the service as an ad-free environment. Users, he says, don't want to share videos "in a cluttered environment that includes advertising." Even YouTube, which long resisted the temptation to interrupt video streams with ads, has recently begun experimenting with semi-transparent video overlays.

In 2006, Best Buy launched its digital music store to compete against Apple's iTunes Music Store, Amazon.com, and other MP3 e-tailers.