MySpace TV To Compete With Google’s YouTube

MySpace, Chasing YouTube, Upgrades Its Offerings from the New York Times reports that MySpace will be launching MySpace TV tomorrow, to better compete against Google’s YouTube.

MySpace TV will be an independent site and will not require a user to have a MySpace ID. There will be integration between MySpace and MySpace TV, enabling MySpace users to display their videos easily within their profiles.

MySpace TV will highlight “professional material,” the New York Times reports, as opposed to homemade videos. MySpace has made deals with Sony for five-minute clips of ’80s sitcoms such as “Diff’rent Strokes” and “Silver Spoons.”

Chris DeWolfe, MySpace’s co-founder and chief executive, told the New York Times,

We haven’t really freshened up our video offering since we launched it. We wanted to highlight the fact that we have a video destination on the Web with all this great content that we’ve acquired.

U.S. centric figures from comScore showed that MySpace had 50.2 million viewers of its videos in April, and You-Tube had 57.9 million viewers.

Postscript: MySpace Rivals YouTube: A Comparison of Both Services from the Search Engine Roundtable has a large write up comparing some of the features of MySpace TV versus YouTube. And MySpaceTV vs YouTube: 12 Things MySpace Copied also has a compare and contrast.

Also, YouTube: 50% More Traffic than Other Video Sites Combined from Hitwise shows us what the challenge MySpace may have in front of them.