San Francisco — MySpace, the world’s leading social network site, a division of News Corp., and RipCode, the pioneer in offering Internet and mobile video system solutions, announced today that MySpace Mobile users worldwide will now be able to enjoy MySpace video content from their video enabled mobile devices while they walk and watch TV at the same time.
MySpace also said that users would presently be able to watch videos they have uploaded or marked as favorite on mobile devices including the BlackBerry Bold, Palm Centro, Motorola Q9, LG Voyager, Nokia N95 and Samsung Instinct. The move makes MySpace the first social network to enable mobile video streaming.
The move is intended to boost MySpace’s mobile offerings and ultimately tap into the mobile-ad market, which has gotten a lot of attention but has largely been slow to gain traction with marketers.
MySpace’s beta mobile video plan is dedicated to ensuring the best user experience by providing the highest quality video for mobile viewing.
The MySpace Mobile site (m.myspace.com) receives approximately three billion worldwide page views per month from more than 10 million monthly unique users. Adding the popularity of the MySpace mobile site with its vast online video library creates a compelling and dynamic mobile environment.
Members will be able to watch video on their own homepages as well as friends’ pages. They also will be able to view professionally produced video from TMZ, the celebrity news and gossip website owned by Time Warner Inc; the National Hockey League; National Geographic magazine; satirical newspaper The Onion and others.
However, currently MySpace does not plan on selling ads tied to the mobile videos at launch; it is nevertheless looking at advertising as a potential revenue stream. MySpace and many other companies are trying to exploit the small but growing mobile advertising market.
One obstruction to selling mobile video ads is that the majority of content available will be user-generated videos. MySpace does not yet sell ads on user-generated videos on its Web site, instead selling Internet video ads tied to premium, often professionally produced content.
MySpace asserts that introducing mobile video will help it create a more engaging experience for its users. “This is a huge step in the evolution of our mobile products,” says John Faith, vice president and general manager of Mobile for MySpace.
MySpace specified that for satisfying the rising video demand, it utilized mobile video infrastructure solutions innovator RipCode’s on-demand video trans-coding technology to optimize mobile video delivery, thereby giving users an improved mobile video experience.
According to MySpace, real time trans-coding will enable it to easily support several different handsets albeit they require different combinations of codecs, bit rates, and resolutions. The company assured that since it is trans-coding video on-demand, mobile users could avoid storing the entire MySpace video library in multiple mobile formats, consequently saving significant hardware, energy and storage resources.
MySpace suggested its mobile users to consult their mobile data plan to shun excessive fees, since accessing and viewing video from mobile devices is a data intensive service. The company added that mobile video quality is based on individual device capabilities as well as network speed and connection.
MySpace declined to comment on the cost of the project or how much money it would make them.
“These are the big guys doing it, and they are going to make some noise about it,” said David Card, a media analyst at Forrester Research who called it a medium-sized deal in terms of significance. “Mobile is one of those things where people keep saying, ‘Is next year going to be the year of mobile’?”
MySpace video will be sent, or “streamed,” from the social network’s pages rather than downloaded onto mobile phones. For this reason, the clips will not be available on Apple Inc.’s iPhone, which runs downloaded video.
MySpace, one of the world’s largest online social networks, plans to support mobile video downloads in the future, a spokeswoman said.