MySpace: Hands off our video

Internet video is the trendy new thing, and Rupert Murdoch doesn't want to be left out.

Now that everyone from NBC to Apple is doing deals to run video online, News Corp. says it may get into the game as well. Chief operating officer Peter Chernin told investors at an industry conference Tuesday that his company is considering setting up a YouTube-like video service for its MySpace social networking site.

Chernin estimated that 60 percent to 70 percent of YouTube's traffic was coming from MySpace, and the company would rather keep the traffic itself than feed off to a middle man.

There was sharp reaction from bloggers to the comments; while they agreed that MySpace is a powerhouse, blocking developers from accessing the site may alienate users, they warned.

Blog community response:

"The COO of News Corp. says that Web 2.0 is leaching traffic off of MySpace, that they can build their own services to compete with any of it and that there's going to be an increasingly aggressive commercial push on the site. That sounds both dangerously arrogant and like a real validation of fears that MySpace dependency is too risky for outside developers."
--TechCrunch

"This is such a ridiculous strategy that it's not even worth contemplating. MySpace's openness to third party extensions (MySpace layouts, MySpace codes) is one of its most popular attributes - squashing that ecosystem may provide short term benefits, but it will ultimately harm them in the long term."
--Mashable

"News Corp should be doing its best to grab more of this attention, and figuring out how to make money in the process. Google deal was a good start, and they need to figure out a 'developer' plan to make money, not come in the way of those who create widgets to put on MySpace pages, or the actual MySpace community."
--Om Malik