-By Mike Shields

TasteofHome.com, the Web offshoot of the Reader’s Digest Association-owned magazine aimed at recipe-lovers, has quietly rolled out a new video channel that blends original content, user-generated clips and professionally produced cooking fare from across the Web.

The new video channel went live in mid-July, though the site just last week began featuring amateur cooks’—it’s bread and butter audience—self produced cooking videos. Previously, TasteofHome.com housed a handful of how-to videos produced by the magazine’s staff.

And while the staff’s output is increasing with the new channel’s rollout, according to Renee Jordan, TasteofHome.com’s general manager, the plan going forward will be to develop the food-centric site as a one-stop shopping outlet for instructional cooking video—through the help of the Web aggregator services firm Magnify.net.  “We are kind of a filter for cooking related videos for our audience,” she said. “This new channel is about integrating hours of recipe videos from across the Web. We want to be their curator.”

Therefore, TasteofHome will incorporate clips from competitors, as long as they appear on third party sites such as YouTube or GoogleVideo and are embeddable on its site.

On the advertising side of things, currently rue North Snacks is running both banner ads and pre-rolls spots within the video channel. Though the site does package pre-roll ads from advertisers with it’s own content, it will not run such ads prior to competitors’ or user-produced footage, said Jordan.