The growing popularity of Internet television isn’t good news for everyone, as businesses are finding to their cost, with falling productivity and rising bandwidth levels.

Sites such as YouTube are gaining users every day, while newly launched services such as Joost and Hulu are enabling people to watch television anywhere they want, including at their place of work.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Carriage Services Inc., a funeral-services company based in Houston, recently found out to their cost that 70% of its 125-person workforce watched videos on YouTube and MySpace for up to an hour a day.

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Quarterlife made its network television début last night, and unfortunately for NBC and show creators Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz it bombed in the ratings.

Quarterlife is the show about a bunch of twenty somethings, hence the title, being roughly a quarter of the way through their lives, which was made for the web.

The show initially aired on MySpace TV, making its debut in November to a swathe of positive reviews. It was then shown via its own website, and has now made its way to network television.

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MySpace seem to be getting increasingly more adventurous in their aims to produce professionally made, high budget drama series.

In spring, or Q2 to be more precise, of this year, we all saw the debut of MySpaceTV’s first serial drama, called “Prom Queen”, which was broken into 90-second-episode snippets and ran for just over a month.

Then just over a week ago, the social network announced the launch of its second episodic production, “Roommates”, an ongoing, scripted, viewer-influenced drama occurring over the course of 45 weekdays.

Now, MySpace has made known its intentions to go even further into the realm of top quality film making. 

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Another multi episode show has today been announced as a MySpace exclusive. 

Following in the wake of Quarterlife, which we spoke about here on WebTVWire last month, Roommates is the newest show to be shown on MySpaceTV, News Corp’s answer to YouTube.

It will share the series out to the social network’s multi-million-strong viewership over the course of some 45 days (weekdays only) in brief three-minute snippets. 

Each new episode will be shown on MySpaceTV starting at 4pm EST, Monday through Friday.

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Viacom, Disney, Microsoft, and MySpace all have a couple of things in common?

Apart from being huge media companies with a lot of financial clout, they also want to set some “guidelines” in order to maintain copyrights online.

The four (seems a strangely small group considering the proportions of the effort, no?) have joined hands to work to establish a commonly acceptable system which will purportedly “stop pirated material” from proliferating and generally protect copyright rules from widespread subversion.

And all four will fail at the job. Well, okay, maybe they will, maybe they won’t. To tell you the truth, I’ve no clue how things will shake out. 

But I kind of find it troubling that corporations are working in unison on technologies to address the issue of peer-to-peer piracy and whatnot, rather than, you know, the institution whose role it is to protect copyright law: government. 

So troubling, in fact, that one can’t help but get a little suspicious about the true intentions of this wee project they’ve all bandied together on.

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Video on the Internet has grown at such an explosive rate that the phenomenon has put an increasing strain on servers, and with it the need for extra storage space.

With video iPods, PSPs, iPhones and many other mobile devices offering video playback, it has become necessary to offer videos in multiple different formats which takes up more space and eats up more bandwidth requirements.

To provide a solution for this growing dilemma, RipCode has been hard at work for the past 18 months developing an appliance-based video transcoding solution that works on-demand and on-the-fly. 

Today, RipCode is launching its service and V4 device and it has announced that MySpace is on-board for testing.

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Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz are creating a new show for MySpace and the Web.

I spoke to MySpaceTV general manager Jeff Berman yesterday, and here are the full details of the show and what impact it could make when it debuts in November.

Facebook may be getting all the headlines lately, but MySpace still has a few cards up its sleeve — including the connections it has to some of the top names in traditional media, thanks to its parent company, media and entertainment giant News Corp.

The social-networking site announced today that it has signed an exclusive deal with Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, the Hollywood duo that produced such hit TV shows as Thirtysomething and My So-Called Life, for the rights to a new Internet drama the pair are working on, called Quarterlife.

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