Fox Interactive Hints of MySpace Expansion to Battle YouTube

In carefully calculated statements made yesterday at a financial analysts' retreat yesterday in Palm Beach, Florida, new Fox Interactive Media president Peter Levinsohn was quoted by Variety as saying the on-again/off-again talks between his parent company, News Corp., and representatives of other major media companies to collectively build an online video sharing destination, are on again. He later hinted that MySpace -- the jewel in the FIM crown -- would be the platform on which that destination would be built.

"We're in very active negotiations with all of the media companies to create the most robust video offering from professional content on the Web," Variety quotes Levinsohn as saying, in a response that may have arisen to a simple inquiry about FIM's efforts to protect its content online.

It apparently became about the project some have called the "YouTube killer," though Levinsohn politely declined to characterize it in those terms (invoking those terms in the act of denial). Later, he added that these negotiations were proceeding very well, and the opportunity is now more likely for "a number of the media companies to get together."

In the past, these media companies involved in multi-party talks have included CBS, Viacom (both of which were once merged parents of Paramount), and NBC Universal, though not Disney, the parent of ABC. Last December, such talks - whose existence had up to that time actually been denied by some of those involved - had their existence confirmed by their having been publicly broken off.

An online media portal run by a coalition of four of the five major US broadcast networks (CBS co-owns The CW with Time Warner) would present a tremendously formidable challenge to Google's YouTube, whose continued presentation of material excerpted from those networks -- even if they were uploaded by members -- would inevitably come under intense legal fire.

YouTube would likely be forced to implement the types of intellectual property controls that it has long promised, though which have yet to be seen, the extent of which could impose new restrictions on the posting freedoms that members to date have enjoyed.

For such a deal to go through on a MySpace platform, Variety theorizes, FIM would have to be willing to share revenue with its broadcast rivals at rates higher than Google's maximums. Speculation has been that YouTube may have been unwilling to bargain with partners with whom it had already presumably made deals, which may have led to the unraveling of its relationship with Viacom and others.

But FIM might be willing to eat some of the costs of a multi-party deal if it boosts the popularity of the already-soaring MySpace platform at YouTube's expense, knocking it down a notch. In comScore rankings of Web property owners released late last month, scored by numbers of unique visitors, for the month of January, Google placed #4 with 113.4 million unique users total. FIM properties collectively placed #6 with 74.8 million visitors.

One Response to Fox Interactive Hints of MySpace Expansion to Battle YouTube

© 1998-2024 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy.