23Musings

A good post from Pete Cashmore on his Mashable blog here. Pete’s spotted, and disseminated, what instantly becomes obvious the moment you get onto the MySpaceTV site (launched today). It looks very similar to YouTube!

I’m sure MySpaceTV will be hugely successful amongst the MySpace community, but how successful it will be outside of that will depend largely on the content that MySpace can get onto it’s player. It’s going to need to use it’s relationships with media owners (NBC/News Corp anyone) to get prime content on it’s site if it stands a chance of competing. And that’s only competing on copyrighted content, how will it fair on user generated content?

As I said, they’ve got the social networking bonus of MySpace to play on, and you can bet that the player becomes the only video player allowed on MySpace, so they’ll get UGC from there. But will it have the pull to attract the guys who are making amateur films etc as those are the ones who have embraced YouTube so completely.

I don’t think this will kill YouTube to be honest. I think the connotations of being associated with MySpace won’t help, it’s my opinion that MySpace needs to adapt to survive beyond being a playground for teens and they currently show no desire to make that shift.

It looks like MySpaceTV has been launched as a YouTube killer, but I don’t think it will cut it without a killer gameplan as well!