MySpace TV to focus on professional video content
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Written By Emily Koh | June 28, 2007 | Share This
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The New York Times reports that MySpace will launch MySpace TV on Thursday. It will operate as an independent website where people can watch and share videos, regardless of whether they have MySpace accounts or not. It will be available immediately in 15 countries and in 7 languages, and videos will be divided up into categories for easy navigation.
Unlike YouTube, which is famous for its archive of home videos, MySpace will focus on providing professional video content. It already got a head start last week offering Sony’s “Minisodes” — five-minute versions of ’80s sitcoms like “Diff’rent Strokes,” “Starsky and Hutch,” and “Charlie’s Angels.” NBC Universal and Fox, both under the News Corp umbrella, have already started talking with MySpace to hammer out a deal that will allow MySpace to feature TV shows or movies from both studios.
MySpace’s hope is that this emphasis on professional material will essentially make it more appealing and “safer” to advertisers than YouTube:
Short ads will appear before clips on the site. Josh Felser, chief executive of the video-sharing site Grouper, which was bought by last fall by Sony, said advertisers clearly preferred such professional content over less predictable user-submitted material.
“Most of the video content today is unsellable,” Mr. Felser said. “We are all in this industry looking at generating inventory that is higher quality.”
MySpace expects that part of the appeal of MySpace TV to studios and professional videomakers will be its aggressiveness in protecting intellectual property. The company was among the first major video sites to use filtering software, which checks uploaded videos to determine if they are protected by copyright. YouTube has also embraced filters, but it is fighting a lawsuit brought by Viacom over past infringement.
“We are sensitive to that issue because we are part of a bigger content company, and protecting intellectual property is part of our bigger business,” Mr. DeWolfe said.
YouTube is well-known for having fought its share of battles regarding copyrighted content being dispersed throughout its site (instigated by the viral popularity of the “Lazy Sunday” clip from NBC’s “Saturday Night Live”). Given YouTube’s notorious legal issues, it’s no surprise to see Myspace using copyright protection as their competitive edge.
Topics: Media Convergence, Search: Video |