NBC and News Corp. Plan YouTube Rival

Mar 23, 09:01 AM

Current Headlines: By From news reports

News Corp. and NBC Universal said Thursday they would jointly create an online video site this summer, in a move to compete directly with the popular YouTube site owned by Google.

The site will feature full-length television shows, movies and clips, including programs like "Saturday Night Live" and "The Simpsons," and hit films like "The Devil Wears Prada" and "Borat."

News Corp. and NBC Universal enlisted companies including AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft, Google's biggest rivals, as the site's initial distribution partners. The service will start in the United States this summer, the companies said.

The free site will include advertising, with Cadbury Schweppes, Cisco Systems and General Motors among companies that have signed on as advertisers. "This is a game changer for Internet video," Peter Chernin, the president and chief operating officer of News Corp., said in the statement.

NBC Universal, with a television network and movie studio, and News Corp., owner of the MySpace Web site and Fox television, are seeking to stave off YouTube's growing popularity with users who upload clips of their favorite shows and movies as well as their own home-made videos. But reclaiming the audience lost to YouTube may prove difficult.

"It's going to be hard for anyone to catch up," said Marianne Wolk, an analyst at Susquehanna Financial Group in New York, who has a "positive" rating on both Yahoo and Google. "YouTube has an enormous following in part due to its strength in user-generated, user-submitted content. That is not being addressed by the NBC-News Corp. site."

More than 133 million people visited YouTube in January, 14 times more than a year earlier, according to comScore Networks, a Web-use research group in Reston, Virginia.

The willingness of media companies to forge a partnership underscores the pressure they feel to counter the growth of Web sites like YouTube. News Corp. bought MySpace for $580 million to get a bigger slice of the online advertising market.

NBC and News Corp. were said to have tried to draw Viacom into the venture. But Viacom, the owner of MTV Networks and Comedy Central, decided to take the legal route against YouTube, accusing it and Google of "massive intentional copyright infringement" in a billion-dollar lawsuit filed this month.

Viacom said the new online video venture was a welcome addition to the industry because it would provide a vehicle that respected copyright protection.

"The venture supports our view that upholding the rights of content creators is the only logical and legitimate path for the creative and technology communities to come together," Viacom said.

News Corp. has also sued to force YouTube to take down clips of some of its shows.

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