MySpace Music is now carrying music videos from all its partners – the big four major record labels and a host of independents. This is setting up a mighty bloodbath between MySpace and Vevo, the YouTube-backed music video-only site launching soon.

Music Video War

To say music videos are a popular part of the Web is an understatement. The chance to choose which videos to watch and when, rather than being beholden to MTV and other music channels, their playlists, and their “lifestyle” programming, is clearly appealing.

YouTube has realized music videos are such a big part of online video that it’s backing Vevo, the Hulu-for-music due to launch soon. There is also Muzu.tv, Vidzone on the PS3, and a number of other music video ventures in the mix.

MySpace Music Plus

MySpace Music has been a part of the social networking site for a couple of years but it really only became a big player last year when an overhaul saw backing by the major record labels and the streaming of full songs and even albums directly on the site.

But until now video hasn’t been a part of the equation.

According to CNET, MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta announced the news at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco earlier today.

MySpace Music Videos

A new MySpace Music video portal will contain thousands of music videos. Users will be able to browse by A-Z listings or follow recommendations from MySpace or their friends.

Importantly for MySpace the music videos will include links to Amazon and iTunes where users can buy the featured tracks. There will also be pre-roll, post-roll, and overlay ads on the music videos, ensuring this is a profitable venture for the site (and the labels).

Competition

This is very much the same model expected to be used on Vevo, but MySpace has got in there first. The competition between the two, alongside less well-known entities such as Vidzone and Muzu.tv, is likely to be healthy but I’m guessing there is enough room for all-comers in this sector of online video.

Internet video took off very quickly, with everyone seeming to want to upload clips either of their own production or of something not owned by themselves.

DMCA Takedowns and Lawsuits

The ability to share video is unfortunately limited by copyright laws and the desire of owners to keep control of their content, so DMCA take down notices and legal challenges became the norm.

However, few would deny that this method hasn’t worked, with Internet users uploading just as much copyrighted material now as ever before.

A Change In The Matrix

Thankfully, the video sites saw the need for change and last year saw YouTube launch a Video ID system that identified copyrighted material and then gave the original owners the option to ask for its removal or monetize it.

As already discussed, an increasing amount of media companies are taking the latter option, and deciding to make money from piracy rather than spend money trying to fight it.

MTV and MySpace

Now, MTV Networks has announced a similar scheme for identifying and monetizing its content on MySpace. This includes shows such as Punk’d, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report.

MTV has decided to use Auditude for this purpose, which is a technology that will identify any one of 250 million videos as belonging to the network, and then add advertising to the streaming video.

Everyone’s A Winner

This not only allows MTV Networks to make extra money from Web video, it means MySpace can stop being copyright cop and allow users more freedom to upload the clips they want to.

What’s bizarre is that the company that owns MTV Networks is Viacom, which is currently suing YouTube for $1 billion over the Google-owned video site’s inability to keep copyrighted material off the Web.

The Monetization Issue

This announcement is yet another example of Internet video becoming accepted and being used by companies to their advantage.

The biggest challenge still facing mainstream use of Web video is that of monetization, and if more companies took measures such as this one then that could become much less of an issue.

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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.

Jeff Parker, the company’s information-technology administrator blocked access to both sites and expressed his shock at the figures:

“I almost fell out of my chair when I saw how many people were doing it and how much bandwidth those sites sucked up.”

Affecting Companies Around The World

Carriage Services is not alone, with companies across the US and beyond starting to take measures to prevent their workers from accessing video sites on the Web while they are meant to be working.

In the same way that instant messaging, streaming music and porn sites have been discovered to be a problem in recent years, online television and video is now the bane of any company’s IT department.

Heavy Traffic At Lunchtime

According to Nielsen Online, the heaviest traffic to Internet video sites is during weekday lunch hours between 12 pm and 2pm, when most people are at work, or at least meant to be.

Rather than slowing down, the problem is expected to get worse, as numerous sites and services including Hulu and Netflix, start to offer high definition streaming, which will push companies networks to the limit, and possibly even over it.

New Problem, New Solutions

But there is a problem associated with broadly banning all media or video files or sites from a company’s network, as it means workers cannot check videos which may be necessary to the running of the business.

This has helped create a whole new business opportunity for some, with various companies offering solutions to the problem, with software which is able to peer into computer traffic and dissect it at the source.

Conclusions

Part of me thinks that company bosses are acting a bit like Big Brother in some cases of worker monitoring, but there’s no doubt it’s an increasing problem which needs something doing about it.

As YouTube and the like continue to grow, and new sites such as Hulu continue to crop up and gain a foothold, companies are going to have to decide on a strategy and stick to it, or there’ll soon find a slowdown in computer traffic, and possibly even outages

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.

A Network Show On A Budget

The show from Zwick and Herskovitz, makers of Thirtysomething and My So-Called Life, was produced on a budget to make it viable for showing exclusively on the web, a budget which now the show is on network television looks ropey.

Due to the writers strike, the TV networks started scouring other mediums for material to fill the void, and a deal was done which saw the show get its NBC première last night.

Poor Ratings

TV by the Numbers have already posted the Nielson ratings for last night’s US television, and they show the first episode only got 3.6 million viewers, coming last in its time slot.

Quarterlife lost out to an ABC Primetime news special, and the ‘is it cancelled or not’ Jericho. There’s a question mark now over whether the series will find itself cancelled after just one solitary episode.

NBC Co-Chair Ben Silverman told The Hollywood Reporter:

“Quarterlife was so worth the try.”

“The web site traffic went up a huge amount and we continue to try new things and new models. It’s very inexpensive but we hoped for higher ratings.”

The Future For Web To TV Transfers?

The bigger question is: With the writers strike well and truly over, will the failure of Quarterlife to transfer successfully from the web to television mean the future of other shows hoping to make the jump are now in doubt?

We may be being a bit too premature, and hopefully given a chance, the show will pick up some viewers in the forthcoming weeks. Remember too that the show has already aired on the web, and MTV.

Conclusions

Maybe the subject matter, which deals with the Internet and young people, is just better suited to the web itself than network television?

As much as language and concepts such as blogging, and video bloggers is an everyday occurrence for those of us who live our lives on the web, most people will be limited to the occasional visit to MySpace and Facebook.

I think webisodes could be converted to network television successfully in the future, but maybe Quarterlife was the sacrificial cow which will allow others the route in.

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. 

MySpace Members Part Of Cast

This time, it’s heading forward with plans to wander into the world of film making. And hired a select few (ten, to be exact) MySpace members (from the UK only) to be part of the cast.

Yes, that’s right, the cast. MySpace even went so far as to arrange for the site’s membership to select its movie’s director (Vito Rocco, who’s short film, submitted to the site, won 500,000 votes), and opened a poll for the choice of cast among a group which auditioned for roles. 

Those chosen, “which include a student and an aerospace engineer,” says the BBC, will “star alongside actors Paul Nicholls and Tim Healy.”

The premise of the film, titled “Faintheart,” is a romantic comedy. It is slated for a summer 2008 release.

Outside Studio Support

Like past professionally-produced video-based creations which MySpace has piloted, Faintheart is being supported by outside studios (Film4 and Vertigo Films), so, if nothing else, the visual value of it will likely be half-decent at the least. 

MySpace expects to have users interested in the project to “contribute to the script,” in order that it continue exemplifying the practice of including public input in it’s creations, be they website related, or content-specific.

Back in February, when MySpace first publicized its search for participants for the venture, the company made it known that the production would have a £1 million budget. Roughly speaking, that should tell you what to expect of it come it’s debut mid-2008.

Paul Glazowski is a contributing author discussing the social networking world, his work can be found on Profy.com

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.

A Web Only Exclusive

The Web-only show follows in the path established by the producers of Prom Queen, a drama which ran over the course of several weeks last spring on the social network.

Prom Queen was the brainchild of Vuguru, a new-media company constructed by the former Walt Disney CEO Michael Eisner.

“Roommates,” a serial involving four recent college graduates, all female, was produced by Iron Sink Media.

The new drama, will be an interactive one, in that while several episodes have been created for distribution on MySpace’s video platform, it will require the input of viewers to “engage” the show’s characters and to “influence the plot,” as the 45-day experiment progresses. 

Plot Driven By User Interaction

A polling tool will be supplied to Myspacers, as will chat and comments features on the profile pages of all characters. 

According to information put forth by the general manager of MySpaceTV, Jeff Berman, about the series in advance of its debut, “the information will be scrutinized and the plot changed” as requested by the viewership.

To some degree, at least. While viewer input can indeed be integrated into an ongoing television series, whether it be of the traditional broadcast variety or this new IPTV-based on-demand arrangement (more so, of course, with the latter), any and all suggestions certainly cannot be entered into the equation. 

User comments can indeed provide added value to the plot and so forth, but there are parameters to which the show’s logical limits must be reasonably set, to “keep the flow,” as it were. If it were to be a free-for-all, well, you can likely imagine what would come of it.

Or not imagine, whichever way you prefer to spin it.

If you’re interested in seeing Roommates for yourself, head on over to its webpage at 4pm EST to catch the first episode. Let us know what you think!

Paul Glazowski is a contributing author discussing the social networking world, his work can be found on Profy.com

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.

Job For The Copyright Board?

Now, I’m not trying to conjure up a conspiracy theory here. To be honest, I think all involved with this newly announced effort are participating with nary an ill intention whatsoever. 

But really, should not the Copyright Board or some other group of suits be doing this kind of generalized work?

Alright, so as I see it, of the four initial participants (the BBC has reported that analysts predict Google will join the fold sometime or other), Viacom and Disney definitely have incentive to keep their respective catalogues from being leaked, pilfered, and distributed illegally.

And because Microsoft and MySpace are venturing more and more into the world of media (as distributors), they’ve got reason to maintain the media companies’ good graces. 

Thus they’ve all at once sat down at the proverbial table to discuss potential solutions to the problems they all now (and will continue to) contend with.

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.

Ripcode V4

The RipCode V4 is a real-time video transcoding appliance that, unlike many other encoding solutions, is “built around arrays of best-in-class DSP-based processors,” which allows it to process multiple transcode paths at the same time. 

This translates to a significantly quicker transcode process. RipCode states that one V4 unit can replace between 10 and 20 general process servers, which are used by most encoding solutions.

Currently, most video content is transcoded into multiple formats in advance, with each different version being stored on a server for consumers to pick their desired format. 

With RipCode, this is unncessary. Only one format needs to be uploaded, and when a user clicks to view a video, the V4 works behind the scenes to determine what type of device is being used and to encode the video on-the-fly. This saves time and server space.

MySpaceTV On Board

RipCode also announced today that MySpaceTV is its first major partner and has completed a successful trial of the RipCode V4 appliance.

“MySpace is committed to meeting our members demand for integrating video and other new media to further enhance and personalize their social networking experience,” said Jeff Berman, General Manager of MySpaceTV. “RipCode’s appliance-based transcoding solution allows us to meet this need.”

With a growing audience of online video viewers using a growing array of devices to access content, RipCode has quite a promising future. 

With all of the money and resources that the MySpace team is bound to save from this solution, I am sure that it will not be too long before we begin to hear about other video sites joining up too. YouTube, Veoh, Revver… are you listening?

Michael Garrett is a contributing author discussing the social networking world, his work can be found on Profy.com

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.

On MySpaceTV First

Episodes — or webisodes — of the show, which follows a group of twentysomethings through the eyes of one young girl with a video-blog, will appear first on MySpaceTV, and then on the Quarterlife.com website.

Jeff Berman, the general manager of MySpaceTV, said in an interview that the show was a “landmark moment” for MySpace, and that it would be “the highest-quality serialized content ever to appear on the Internet. We’re talking about the same production values as 24 or Prison Break.”

There have been a number of episodic TV-style shows created for the Internet, including the popular Lonelygirl15 show, which was developed by a trio of unknowns and also appears on MySpaceTV. 

More recently, former Walt Disney CEO Michael Eisner’s company created a show called Prom Queen, which aired on MySpaceTV and drew a large following.

Entertainment websites have been speculating for several months about a possible Internet offering from Mr. Zwick and Mr. Herskovitz, after a number of reports leaked out about TV writers and production staff working on something called Quarterlife. 

The Hollywood duo had a traditional TV show of the same name that ran briefly in 2005.

Debuts On November 11th

“We’ve been talking to [Zwick and Herskovitz] for the past several weeks, and we’re delighted to be able to announce this,” Mr. Berman said. The first “webisode” will be posted on MySpaceTV on November 11.

Under the terms of the deal, the social-networking site has a 24-hour window during which the webisode will only be available on MySpaceTV. After that, it will appear on Quarterlife.com. 

Both sites will have interactive features, Mr. Berman said, but on MySpace viewers will be able to interact with the cast through their MySpace pages.

MySpace users and bloggers on other sites will also be able to “embed” the webisodes in their pages by pasting in a small chunk of code, as they can with video clips on other sites such as YouTube, Blip.tv and DailyMotion.

When asked whether the new show would have a mobile component involving cellphones, Mr. Berman said “stay tuned.” 

More To Come?

He also said that MySpaceTV was working on several other projects with content creators in the entertainment community.

According to Mr. Berman, more than 50 million users stream video each month from their MySpace webpages, and the social-networking site as a whole produces 500 million individual video streams every month.

Written by Mathew Ingram, a technology journalist. Catch his views on the intersection between media and the web at MathewIngram.com. This post is licensed under the Creative Commons.

Television bigwig and owner of MySpace, Fox Interactive Media, has appointed Tom Bosco as Vice President and head of sales for the recently updated and launched (and not in any way anything like YouTube, *cough*), MySpaceTV video portal.

Bosco is something of a seasoned broadband video pro, having helped to launch both MSN and AOL’s Video services as well as serving on the Internet Architecture Board broadband committee.

Fox Interactive Media is currently baying for content deals for MySpaceTV, having recently secured the likes of Lonelygirl15, The Onion, and Sony Pictures Television.

The site is certainly starting to come together and the addition of Bosco and all of his experience is sure to give the service a boost. It will probably still always live in the shadow of the colossus mind, but could make for a valiant second act…

[Via NewTeeVee]