Well, the good news is, I think I've pretty much worked my way through every episode of Malcolm In The Middle that has been illegally uploaded to YouTube, which is 'good news' because I have a feeling Fox might be getting hardline in ordering the Google owned video sharing site to take down its copyrighted content, given that its parent company, News Corp, last week announced it planned to launch a YouTube rival through a new joint venture with fellow US media conglom NBC Universal.
The new ad funded venture - which as yet has no name or even a management team - will make available complete programmes from the two media firms' libraries as well as allowing users to upload their own content in a YouTube style fashion. The media giants presumably hope their service will stand out by providing legitimate access to numerous hit TV shows as well as offering all the user generated content facilities. And the new service will hope to reach a mass audience quickly via partnerships with Google's online rivals MSN, AOL and Yahoo, plus via News Corp's own web phenomenon, MySpace.
Whether the new venture can take on market leader YouTube remains to be seen - though if and when the Google service is forced to take off line the multitude of copyrighted content it currently hosts and, as the previously reported lawsuit recently launched against YouTube by Viacom demands, to introduce measures to ensure such content never gets online in the future, rivals with their own libraries of popular content may be able to take the lead, given that the genuine user-generators seem willing to upload their content to every service going. So YouTube's dominance may well be threatened unless, as major media firms often do in the online space, News Corp and NBC Universal really fuck it up.