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MySpace Games Launching in January

MySpace Games Launching in January
News Corp has its hands in just about everything these days, it owns the Fox film and TV outlets, including Fox News and National Geographic, it has significant holdings in DirecTV and the UK's SKY TV, an absurd number of newspapers including the New York Post, and soon, the prestigious Wall Street Journal, mega publisher Harper Collins. It also owns popular online destinations Rotten Tomatoes, and, of course, MySpace.

It's the last property in that list that has been one of our constant targets for both well deserved and occasionally frivolous reporting. MySpace is trying to become a one-stop portal for everything you could possibly need on the Web. What began as a simple social-networking site has expanded to cover music, video, comedy, news, ringtones, Internet telephony, and even past episodes of Fox television shows.

Now you can add video games to MySpace's list of offerings that you won't have to go anywhere else to find. MySpace Games is set to launch in January of 2008 as part of a partnership with casual-games publisher Oberon Media. The target audience, naturally, is casual gamers who play Flash versions of word, puzzle and board games on sites like PopCap and AOL Games.

MySpacers will be able to play games with other MySpacers on the Games channel, as well as embed scaled down versions on their MySpace profiles for instant gaming and even slower load times!

From GigaOM

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Anti-Piracy Coalition Forming on Friday Includes CBS, Disney, Fox

Companies Join Forces to Form Anti-Piracy Coalition
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) today, several major media and technology companies are joining forces to form the Masters of Evil! Wait... sorry, they are just joining forces to form an anti-piracy ring, no plots for world domination... yet.

This coalition of super companies will be working together on copyright-related issues, including video piracy and the technology needed to stop it.

Coming together to form this super team of anti-pirates are: CBS, Dailymotion, Microsoft, NBC Universal, Fox and MySpace units of News Corp, Viacom and Disney. The coalition is due to launch Friday. Google is still in talks to join the anti-piracy ring.

From Tech Crunch

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'The Simpsons' On Your Cell Phone


The marketing blitz and fan hysteria surrounding the new Simpson's movie is gearing up to go mobile. News Corp., Rupert Murdoch's media juggernaut, after pushing Simpson's paraphernalia via 7-11 (pictured above) is enlisting Jamba, a mobile entertainment company it aquired, to push ring-tones, screen savers, wall papers, and even a game for cell phones.

These are not half-assed recycled bits from the show either: The writers and actors were directly involved in the creation of the product line. The content will be available in 35 countries across 5 continents for a subscription fee of $9.99 a month.

The "Yellow Plan" as, it's called, may seem overpriced, but this is 'The Simpsons'. Other brands would kill for the level of dedication that even "casual fans" have.

From Reuters

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MySpace TV: A Better YouTube Competitor?



In a bid to better compete with YouTube for the eyes and ears of Web users (but not in a creepy, serial killer kind of way), MySpace is re-launching the less than impressive video component of its site. Tomorrow, MySpace Videos will be torn down like the Stardust Casino to be resurrected as a separate site, MySpace TV.

The most important change, other than the new URL, is that you no longer have to be a member of MySpace to share and watch video. Another update changes how video is integrated into the pages of MySpace members. A user's video will now be stored on a separate MySpace TV channel, which the user will have the ability to customize (to death) to match his or her MySpace page. The third shift is that MySpace TV will put much more focus on professionally produced content (though user-generated content will still be there), such as the five minute Webisodes of '80s sitcoms MySpace began hosting through an exclusive partnership with Sony. As the newly adopted son of Rupert Murdoch and the Fox Corporation, MySpace is also already trumpeting the new site's respect for copyright in order to position itself as an attractive alternative to YouTube for major media companies. Finally, later this year, the company will introduce online editing tools, just as YouTube did very recently.

Meanwhile, as MySpace tinkers with video to compete with YouTube, YouTube is playing around with social networking with the hopes of taking a bite out of MySpace. On YouTube's "Test Tube" product development page, users can now share their favorite videos and even chat while they watch the same clip.

And round and round we go. It'll be interesting to see if these two massive online destinations will co-exist as the Coke and Pepsi of the Internet, or if things will turn sour. As of now, you can still embed YouTube videos in MySpace pages -- but how long is that going to be allowed, especially once Google starts piping advertisements into YouTube vids? Let's not forget the spat back in April in which MySpace blocked all content users embedded on their pages from the photo- and video-sharing site, Photobucket. This, after Photobucket sponsors began showing up in slideshows hosted on MySpace pages. Of course, MySpace went on to absorb Photobucket for lots and lots of money, which only raises more questions. For example, will Photobucket images now be blocked on Facebook, a MySpace competitor?

Only time will tell.

From The New York Times

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