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.

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.

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.

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]

Once she was a YouTube darling. Then she was exposed as being fictitious. Now, her creators have signed an exclusive deal with MySpaceTV – an indication that LoneyGirl15 is all grown up.

MySpace today announced an exclusive deal to broadcast the season one finale of the famous LonelyGirl15 series. Dubbed “12 in 12”, the final episode will be shown in one to four minute segments over twelve consecutive hours.

The first segment will be available on MySpaceTV at 8am Friday, August 3rd (EDT in the US), followed by eleven other segments on the hour every hour. The second series of the video blogger style videos, which feature a teenage girl named Bree, will commence on August 6th.

MySpace has teamed with the Producers Guild of America to give amateur video makers a chance to make it big in Hollywood.

The Story Teller Challenge, like many of the current video contests going around, professes to be a way to shortcut the red-tape of Hollywood and get an audience with top studio executives – and an opportunity to make it big!

The competition is perhaps another sign that News Corp – which owns MySpace – is committed to investing in online talent. Another report suggests the company is producing a TV series exclusively for its social networking site.

It’s been reported that the News Corp owned social networking site, MySpace, may be commissioning an exclusive web TV show.

Whilst News Corp haven’t confirmed (or denied) the production, it’s alleged that a group of Hollywood talent has been assembled to start work on an original series.

Having plenty of pull in the TV and media industry in general, it’s certainly not unfathomable that News Corp would try its hand at online TV. It already has a massive potential audience in its MySpace community.