• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, September 10, 2010

Metacafe's transformation into an entertainment video hub advances to its next stage with the company's acquisition of Action Sports, Inc. the owner of sports video destination Go221.com. Metacafe already aggregates and curates video content on the major mainstream sports at its Sport channel. This buy adds to the inventory more extreme pursuits like skateboarding, snowboarding and about ten others things my chiropractor tells me to avoid.

Go211.com Webcasts live from action sports events around the world and packages highlights. This site accesses events like the Blackjack Nationals (BMX racing) and the Oregon Trifecta (skating). The core content from Go211 will be part of the upcoming launch of Metacafe Sports, another in the site's video content verticals. Earlier this year the site launched a movies channel that included curated content from full-time expert editors.

Consolidation in the digital content industry continues as aggregators start to morph into greater content creation and publishing roles. Glam Media also announced yesterday that it was acquiring German men's content site FantasticZero, another male-oriented destination with multimedia content announced yesterday.

The companies that succeeded in achieving scale are cherry picking the content they want to absorb but also looking for technologies and expertise that make sense elsewhere in their companies. Metacafe is not only buying into a content vertical but also Go211's experience with staging live Webcast events and produce video for the Web quickly. They will deploy some of this experience across the movies, video games, TV and music verticals that the site has already launched or plans to launch in the future. In each of these verticals, the acquisition could add new types of homegrown content that reach well beyond curation.

Still, Metacafe will maintain Go211 as a standalone site. Between the two destinations, they will reach over 17 million monthly uniques.