June 29, 2007 | Friday

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MySpaceTV v YouTube

By Jon Myers, Director Of Search in News |Search Engines |Google |Search Technology

Video is a big battle ground at the minute. With 1.98 Billion video streams initiated in April 2007 in the UK alone the growth is phenomenal. 38% of this was via Google sites including YouTube.

So it was interesting to see yesterday that MySpace had re branded its video outlet to MySpaceTV. The hope seems to be to attract more uses to the MySpace video portal and offer up quality video content to the internet users.

The site will give value to professionally done videos and the MySpace editors will take the chance to promote them on the site as what they see as quality content. In this move toward professional content, MySpace published Sony’s “Minisodes.” Sponsored by Honda, these are five-minute clips are from 15 vintage sitcoms and are the exclusive outlet for this.

I would think we will see a lot more of these types of promotions across MySpaceTV giving the chance to marketers to professionally promote brands as well as anybody being able to upload content just like YouTube. The New York Times reported that this is a serious attempt by News Corp, the owner of MySpace, to challenge YouTube.

This should put MySpace in a more competitive position to YouTube and it will be interesting to see how this develops in the coming months after YouTube has already seen fantastic growth in the UK.