Now that the election is over there is going to be no shortage of punditry looking to pinpoint exactly what moments in the last 18 months contributed to Barack Obama’s victory over John McCain. No one is better equipped for this analysis than Auditude, the video fingerprinting company that was recently employed to power part of MySpace’s video platform.
Using a database chronicling millions of hours of video content, Auditude can identify the original source of video clips scattered across the web, even if they’re only a few seconds long. And with that, the company can figure out which speeches, gaffes, and ads actually mattered to The People.

For its initial analysis of the election, Auditude has mapped out the popularity of each moment in this year’s three presidential debates. Crawling across sites like YouTube, Veoh, MySpace, and Yahoo, the site isolated several thousand videos depicting portions of each debate, and then laid them out in a timeline to determine which moments were the most viewed.

Since YouTube heralded the era of user-uploaded videos, media corporations have been fighting a hopeless battle to regain control of their content, sending out endless waves of DMCA notices in a vain attempt to take down countless clips scattered across the web. In the last year sites like Hulu have made progress – it’s finally possible to legally embed a clip of The Office in your blog, but publishers continue to lose out on millions of video clips that were uploaded without permission.

Now MySpace – a site that once seemed the antithesis of innovation – has implemented an exciting new ad platform called Auditude that may change the way content owners treat uploaded video entirely. The new platform will automatically identify any uploaded video clips from a number of shows produced by MTV Networks (including my personal favorite “The Daily Show”), and will display an overlay when the clip is played that shows which episode the clip originally came from, its original air-date, and links to online stores where users can buy the entire episode.