MySpace, one of the world's most popular social networking sites, is set to challenge YouTube for dominance in the online video sharing market.The site plans to rename and redesign its video offerings, under the title MySpace TV, the New York Times reveals.
It will be set up independently from the original host site, where users can share and watch online clips, regardless of whether or not they have a MySpace account.
MySpace users, which total well over 100 million a month worldwide, will be able to integrate videos into their personal profiles more easily with the new service.
Chris DeWolfe, MySpace's co-founder and chief executive, commented: "We haven't really freshened up our video offering since we launched it.
"We wanted to highlight the fact that we have a video destination on the web with all this great content that we've acquired."
The MySpace TV site will focus much of its attention towards professional video clips, rather than the user-generated content that makes up the majority of other video sharing rivals.
Timothy Tuttle, a vice president at America Online who is involved with the running of AOL's video search team, said: "I'm not surprised MySpace is promoting video heavily.
"YouTube is becoming a social network that is maybe even more powerful than MySpace. So they are rightly focusing on that."
Figures released by comScore back in April suggest that MySpace is already making great strides in cutting YouTube's online video dominance.
Although YouTube secured 57.9 million US viewers compared to MySpace's 50.2 million, the results showed the latter's numbers grew at a faster rate.
