"NewTube:" MySpace Video Media Alliance Site Will Reach Nearly All US Internet Users

While Google's YouTube wrestles with media giants such as Viacom, which is suing it, and trying to build alliances with others, MySpace's media giant parent is cutting deals and helping it to leapfrog ahead, giving it connections that yield a potential audience of 96 percent of the US Internet market.

In a report in The Australian, a paper owned by the same parent company as MySpace, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, the alliances the site is forming with NBC Universal and others are being pitched as media companies "taking risks" to band together. They see the banding together as necessary against the upstart Internet companies, including YouTube and Apple's iTunes. "YouTube can still distinguish itself" with popular tools to share homemade videos, they said, as well as professionally made media, but the companies want to have better control of advertising and copyright of their commercial media.

Other partners with MySpace, the paper noted, include Yahoo, Microsoft and Time Warner's AOL, Google's main rivals, which together represent access to nearly all of the US Internet market. News Corp.'s Chief Operating Officer Peter Chernin proclaimed that "this is a game changer for internet video." While sources were quoted discussing the room for competition in the rapidly expanding business, Chernin revealed the genius of his company's plan, and the resulting alliances: "We'll have access to just about the entire US internet audience at launch. And for the first time, consumers will get what they want - professionally-produced video delivered on the sites where they live."