The topic of business models dominated yesterday’s digiday:Video Upfront panel on syndication. And while the path to monetization for content providers is not clearly defined, a few viable ones exist.

“Brands are paying us large sums of money to create 30 second spots that run along side out games,” said Sundance DiGiovanni, CEO of Major League Gaming, which has 12 million unique visitors per month. “Right now that pays to distribute the gaming content, but I think that as production values have to increase and production costs increase, we’ll have to consider subscription fees.”

Syndication in the traditional, cable sense of the word was not what yesterdays’ panelists were after. They seemed to be searching more for a consistent platform on which gaming and user generated content could be distributed across sites. Boxee, which has designed a cross-media platform for content distribution that includes TV paying its developers royalties from ads, will introduce a payment platform for premium content this summer.

Scot McLernon, chief revenue officer of video ad network YuMe (pictured), believes that the distribution for games and other content is too complex, and will need to be simplified for advertisers. “We’re creating the storm before the calm,” he said. “There’s too many partners involved in a simple process. There’s different platforms, different players, different measurement systems, and different reasons to advertise. We need to simplify distribution. We need to focus on increasing the reach of TV with an interactive component.”

YuMe recently closed a $25 funding round and is seeing growth from its video ad management platform, ACE. Premium publishers including MSN, Msnbc Digital Network, IDG Entertainment and Glam Media use ACE to serve in–stream ads across multiple platforms, including PC, mobile and IPTV. In addition, YuMe saw exponential video advertising sales growth, reaching profitability and serving an average of 30 million in–stream video ads per day in December 2009.