NewsCorp owned MySpace yesterday announced the launch of MySpaceTV, a new dedicated MySpace branded competitor to YouTube. The new MySpace video sharing site will work independantly to the regular MySpace social networking site.

According to the NYTimes, MySpaceTV will also have a strong focus for professionally produced content from the likes of NBC Universal and Fox (also owned by News Corp), in addition to the regular user generated content.

Much like the situation in many schools the Pentagon decided to ban a variety of sites from the military including Metacafe, YouTube, iFilm, StupidVideos, FileCabi, Photobucket MySpace, BlackPlanet , MTV and more.

YouTube has now challenged the ban and is now working with the Pentagon to encourage them to remove the block.

YouTube’s CEO Chad Hurley said:

"They said it might be a bandwidth issue, but they created the Internet, so I don’t know what the problem is."

I just noticed that Google is integrating video thumbnails into its regular search results. It is doing this for video clips from select sites (pictured above).

Video sites that seem to get a thumbnail are:

• Yahoo Video
• MetaCafe
• YouTube
• Google Video
• MySpace
• Vimeo

MySpace, the social networking site which is expected to generate $525 million in revenue in the U.S. this year, has launched video sharing services on its Japanese site.

I personally do not like MySpace due to the poor design, excessive adverts and the users that insist on creating crazy profiles full of weird backgrounds, falling objects, MySpace games and other crap. I’ve even seen this annoying lava lamp on someone’s MySpace profile. I definately prefer the simplicity of FaceBook.

Putting personal opinions aside, MySpace.com holds a 15% market share of the internet video market according to Compete.com making it the second most popular video sharing site on the net — given the demographic of Compete.com I assume this 15% market share generally relates mainly to U.S. and English speaking users.

When it comes to the top video sharing websites on the internet the following websites are freqently mentioned:

• YouTube
• Blip.tv
• VideoEgg
• MetaCafe
• Dailymotion
• Veoh
• Google Video
• Grouper
• Jumpcut
• Eyespot
• MSN SoapBox
• MySpace Video
• AOL Uncut Video

So I thought it would be worthwhile to take a quick look to see just how popular these video sharing sites really are, and how their popularity compares.

I’ve just done this quickly using Alexa rank, its not the most accurate, but its the best we’ve got really. Here are the results:

The RIAA is definitely one of the most hated organizations among internet users along with the MPAA for frequently preventing people from sharing music and video online, as well as restricting the use of media in general.

But these organizations are in the US and when it comes to Europe things can get A LOT worse. European internet law is significantly behind that of the US and in my view there is an inherent misunderstanding and lack of clarification of what is legal and what isn’t.