MySpace to offer mobile streaming video

MySpace is going mobile with streaming video.

News Corp.'s social-networking site is expected to offer video clips from members' pages, as well as professionally produced ones, to video-enabled mobile devices starting Wednesday, according to a Reuters report. Professional video will be provided by the likes of celebrity gossip site TMZ, the National Hockey League, and National Geographic magazine.

The service will be free to users--supported by advertising. The move, which will make MySpace the first social network to offer mobile streaming video, is an attempt to tap into the small but growing mobile advertising market.

"These are the big guys doing it, and they're going to make some noise about it," David Card, a media analyst at Forrester Research, told Reuters.

The service will be available on devices such as the BlackBerry Bold, Palm Centro, Motorola Q9, LG Voyager, Nokia N95 and Samsung Instinct. But because the service will stream videos rather than download them, it will be incompatible with Apple's iPhone.

MySpace is working with video-transcoding company RipCode to make video available on a variety of different devices with different specifications on how they handle video streaming.