News Corp., NBC partner up on Internet video distribution

Back in December, we reported “NBC, News Corp., CBS, and Viacom are all in talks to take out the grand champion YouTube, by creating a competing site in which they get all the profits.” Well, it looks like this may be true after all. So far, only General Electric (NBC’s parent company) and News Corp (parent company to Fox) have stepped up to the challenge, with others likely to join in on the action before launch.

The issue with the network television stations partnering like this is that they all bring their own agendas to the table. When you have conflicting agendas, it’s extremely difficult to get things done in a manner that each party is happy with. According to TechDirt, the beginning of these talks between companies were destined for trouble when “the networks couldn’t agree with each other on the revenue split, showing that they were (once again) more focused on the short-term revenue possibilities, rather than the long-term opportunities to build a new platform that actually served viewers’ needs better.”

Another interesting fact about this so called partnership is that they have decided to partner up with just about every major video site for distribution… well, except for Google. So far, the list includes Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and MySpace, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they added in MetaCafe and a few other viral sites to to really send a message to Google.

Read [LATimes] Via [TechDirt]