But don’t worry — I’m not gonna predict that millions and millions of people are ready to abandon Facebook for the next hot thing. In fact, this isn’t even about anything that Facebook, or its users are doing. Instead, it’s about the perception that Facebook can help to sell media products that no one wants to buy.

You see, when MySpace was still on top of its game, there was a moment when people thought it could help save the entertainment industry. Countless bands were on MySpace, and many of them found it to be an invaluable tool for communicating with their fans. That’s when folks in the music industry got the idea to use MySpace not only for promotion, but actual distribution as well.

First up was Snocap, the music startup founded by Napster’s Shawn Fanning. Snocap wanted to sell MP3s directly on musician’s MySpace profiles, complete with a widget and a rather complicated backend. Snocap’s pitch was that indie bands would be able to avoid the middle man and directly sell to consumers, and reputable online music platforms like CD Baby joined to give their 200,000 musicians a chance at raking in the dough.

Only, the money never came. CD Baby founder Derek Sivers wrote an eye-opening account of his dealings with Snocap in 2007, detailing how he hired six people to exclusively work on the cooperation — only to receive a measly $12,000 check for eight months of music sales on MySpace. Snocap eventually closed shop when its assets were acquired by Imeem in early 2008.

Imeem itself got acquired by Myspace in late 2009, only to be folded into MySpace Music, a service the social network launched in cooperation and co-ownership with the four major record labels. The primary goal of MySpace Music wasn’t to sell tracks like Snocap, but to make money through advertising. And guess what: That didn’t work either. MySpace Music burned through “a lot of money,” observed Greg Sandoval from CNet last summer, reporting that MySpace was thinking about switching to a subscription model.

What does Facebook have to do with all of this? Both sites are obviously quite different, but the similarities are striking if you look at the way folks in the media business are projecting all of their hopes on them. Case in point: I got a pitch for a startup last week that wants to sell VOD rentals from independent filmmakers on Facebook, much in the same way that Snocap wanted to sell music downloads.

The startup in question, Berkeley-based FlickLaunch, actually has a pretty neat feature: Film makers can decide to give any number of views of their movie away for free, only asking users to press the Like button if they want access to the title. That way, 1,000 free views become 1,000 promotional messages in people’s Facebook news feeds, which could potentially reach a huge crowd for free. FlickLaunch also has the benefit of launching at a time when major studios are looking to Facebook as well to boost their online VOD sales. Warner Bros. has been experimenting with renting The Dark Knight and Harry Potter on Facebook, allowing users to pay for the movies with Facebook credits.

However, none of that matters if the product isn’t right. Internet users have for the most part rejected one-off VOD rentals, and opted for Netflix-like subscription plans instead. Netflix has captured 61 percent of the digital movie market, according to recent data from the NPD Group. Apple’s iTunes store, which is the biggest online platform for VOD rentals and sales, only has four percent of the market.

Of course, you can convince yourself that all you need is a better social media strategy to make online VOD take off and put all your bets on Facebook. Or you can face the facts: Facebook may be a great platform that has much to offer for the media business. But it won’t help you sell things no one wants to buy, much like MySpace didn’t help the record labels to preserve a failing business model.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Denis Dervisevic.

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MySpace Taps New Content Chief; the social network has tapped Andy Marcus to take the reins on its efforts in the entertainment business. (The Hollywood Reporter) Related: MySpace Gets Synced with YouTube (WebProNews)

Dell Evaluating Internet TV Devices and Google TV Software; the company is evaluating new devices from set-top box makers that could seamlessly bring Internet content to TVs, said Chris Camilletti, desktop product manager at Dell. (PC World)

Concurrent Buys TellyTopia To Dive Into Internet Video; the VOD vendor acquired TellyTopia to let pay-TV providers incorporate Internet-hosted video into their services, therefore bolstering its multiscreen strategy. (Multichannel News)

Comcast Tees Up TV Everywhere Relaunch; MSO chief financial officer Michael Angelakis said Comcast’s TVE service, dubbed Xfinity Online TV, is set to emerge from beta sometime next month. (Light Reading Cable)

DirecTV Looks At Bundle Opportunities; DirecTV CEO Michael White said the satellite giant is looking hard at offering bundled video and data service, and would even team up with a cable operator if the opportunity presented itself. (Multichannel News)

Univision And The NFL Team Up; Univision and the National Football League announced the launch of www.NFL.com/espanol, the new official Spanish-language website of the NFL. (press release)

The player, powered by Redux, enables users to easily create a video channel in their activity streams. The video player will show a real-time stream of videos based on what a user or his her friends are sharing and what’s trending on MySpace. The player also allows users to share, comment or watch in full-screen “TV mode” video that comes up in the stream. In “TV mode,” the video includes a ticker along the bottom that continues to update the user on what’s happening in his or her activity stream while watching the video.

By bringing together all the video content that a user has uploaded, shared, selected as a favorite or rated from the social network in one place, MySpace hopes to improve content discovery for users, including sharing and viewing videos from MySpace Music artists, while also increasing user engagement and time spent on the site.

We’ve long argued that video wants to be social, a thesis that is being proven out not just by the growth in the number of social TV apps that have come to market over the past several months, but also through the rapid adoption of video on that other social network. In the past year, Facebook has become a major player in online video, with its users viewing more than 2 billion videos per month. No doubt MySpace is hoping that it can emulate some of that success with its own video initiative.

Related content on GigaOM Pro: Report: The Consumer Video Chat Market, 2010-2015 (subscription required)

MySpace Launches Romeo Music Video App; the app allows users to choose from 15 music genres such as pop or hip-hop, and 13 moods including “chill” and “studying.” (WebProNews)

Cable Firms Look to Tablet Computers; at least seven of the ten largest subscription-TV providers in the U.S. are building new tablet-computer apps that offer select TV shows and movies. (Wall Street Journal)

Hollywood: Open Net Can’t Be Pirate Haven; Hollywood studios told the FCC Thursday that reclassifiying broadband access is not necessary to achieve an open Internet, and is not a desirable method of achieving that public policy goal. (Multichannel News)

How Is 3D TV Doing? Some Data From Japan; in Japan, prices for 3D TVs offered by the two most aggressive manufacturers, Panasonic and Sony, have fallen 20% and more since they were introduced back in spring this year. (CrunchGear)

Verizon and AT&T Ban BitTorrent On Wireless Networks; BitTorrent and other types of evil traffic have already been banned for years by Verizon, AT&T and others. (TorrentFreak)

In today’s blog post by YouTube Chief Counsel Zahavah Levine, Levine takes issue with some of Viacom’s accusations towards YouTube,, given Viacom made repeated attempts to acquire YouTube before the Google deal happened:

Viacom’s brief misconstrues isolated lines from a handful of emails produced in this case to try to show that YouTube was founded with bad intentions, and asks the judge to believe that, even though Viacom tried repeatedly to buy YouTube, YouTube is like Napster or Grokster.

According to CNET, Viacom was in fact serious enough about acquiring YouTube that it extended an offer prior to Oct. 9, 2006, when the deal was announced. What they proposed was that the two companies buy it together as a partnership, and thus “Viacom [would legitimize] the content on the site by providing content and developing a business model,” former Viacom exec Adam Cahan told CNET writer Greg Sandoval.

Before Google bought YouTube, Viacom was looking at the site, and even cautiously saying so publicly: On Oct. 4, 2006, Viacom Founder Sumner Redstone told Charlie Rose that YouTube was a potential acquisition as opposed to Facebook. “It’s a very good company,” he’s quoted as saying (video embedded below).

Five days after that interview, though, Google officially announced it would acquire YouTube for $1.65 billion. And five months after that, Viacom took its first legal action against YouTube, demanding that more than 100,000 clips be removed.

It’s interesting to consider what might have happened to YouTube had the Viacom acquisition occurred. You probably wouldn’t hear talk like “YouTube has become a metaphor for the democratizing power of the Internet and information” (per today’s blog post by YouTube Chief Counsel Zahavah Levine) if the site hadn’t remained independent from big media.

Instead, YouTube might have resembled MySpace following its acquisition by News Corp, working overtime to promote its parent company’s media properties. YouTube’s allegation that Viacom used YouTube as a promotional device after the Google acquisition only supports that theory.

Perhaps as an apology, Google offered Viacom $590 million for a licencing deal (per Peter Kafka on Twitter). But that doesn’t change the fact that like a cheerleader with too many options, YouTube decided to go with someone else to the prom. And so in the Viacom filing made public today, Viacom attacked YouTube’s principles and ethics with statements like:

YouTube’s founders single-mindedly focused on geometrically increasing the number of YouTube users to maximize its commercial value. They recognized they could achieve that goal only if they cast a blind eye to and did not block the huge number of unauthorized copyrighted works posted on the site. The founders’ deliberate decision to build a business based on piracy enabled them to sell their start-up business to Google after 16 months for $1.8 billion.

You have to admit, that kind of sounds like something a bitter ex would write.

Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required): Will Three Strikes Laws Take the Field in U.S. Copyright Ballgame?

In a phone call with NewTeeVee, Veoh founder Dmitry Shapiro placed a lot of blame on the Universal Music Group copyright infringement suit, as well as the broader macro-economic situation. The UMG lawsuit might have limited its strategic opportunities or scared off new investors, but Veoh made a number of missteps before its final demise. Here are a few:

Raising too much money

Veoh raised $70 million, including a $30 million round that it brought on after it was clear that the company was having problems. Compare that to Blip.tv, which was founded around the same time and has raised a total of $8.5 million over the last five years.

Getting too big too fast

One of the traps of raising a bunch of money is having to justify it to your shareholders — and that frequently involves spending too much, too fast. According to MediaMemo, Veoh was spending up to $4 million a month on bloated staff and infrastructure costs. In other words, like Joost, it wasn’t acting — or spending its cash — like a startup. The company had about 120 employees at one point, which it cut down to 20 before finally closing down shop this week, but the bigger costs came in bandwidth and infrastructure bills, which it couldn’t really avoid.

No strategic focus

In his requiem for Veoh, Shapiro writes that Veoh “was launched in September of 2005 with a bold goal: To make it possible for anyone with a video camera and a computer to broadcast video to the world.” That might have been the plan at the start, but Veoh tried a number of things over its short lifespan: it tried to attract independent producers with an ad split, tried to bring in premium content and even at one point attempted to fund production of its own content before finally focusing on its Video Compass search and discovery technology.

Requiring a client download

When Veoh launched its long-form video service, VeohTV, it made the viewing experience available only through a downloadable application (and later a browser plugin), which optimized viewing through peer-to-peer distribution. As with Joost, that hampered adoption, especially as Veoh’s peers — like Hulu and YouTube — emphasized in-browser video delivered through Adobe Flash. On the phone, Shapiro said this was likely the biggest mistake the company made: “We probably could have had a lot more traction at the time if we had streamed,” he said, but without cash to pay for bandwidth costs, it would have been difficult to get off the ground without the P2P client.

Turning its back on its users

The biggest indicator that Veoh was in trouble came in the summer of 2008, when it blocked access to videos on its site to all but 33 international markets. The explanation was basically that Veoh wasn’t able to monetize videos in those markets, so it was limiting costs from serving them there. But it upset a number of users from around the world who had come to rely on the site for interesting video content.

Related content on GigaOM Pro (subscription required): Not Your Grandfather’s Streaming Video Business

This year, though, marks a whole new evolution for the awards ceremony; not only is the site moving forward with a renewed use of the web, but it’s celebrating fan engagement with the music world. This has led to the unique step of building a sister site to Grammy.com — one that showcases how the music fan expresses him or herself online these days.

The We’re All Fans site uses technology developed by Visible Technologies to give a real-time portrait collage of what people are saying, Tweeting, and YouTubing about Lady Gaga, Maxwell, Leonard Cohen, Taylor Swift, Kings of Leon and ten other major artists from all genres of the music industry, selected due to the size of their followings and their relevance to social media. The campaign concept is currently driving print, outdoor and TV advertising, including 30-second spots that show the idea in action, such as this Lady Gaga adaptation built around fan videos from YouTube.

The nifty bit is this: The Grammys have annotated the ad on YouTube with links to the original videos sampled, and excited fans, thrilled to be featured, linked back to the spot, helping it to get over 750,000 views in its first two days, with the ad now currently hitting over 1.1 million views. Beyonce and LL Cool J videos have followed.

In addition to YouTube, the Grammys are working with MySpace as its streaming partner — for a full 72 hours leading up to the show, live events and behind-the-scenes footage will be featured. This includes the Sunday afternoon three-hour pre-telecast awards, the Grammys red carpet, and the after party. “It’s the longest stream any awards show has ever done,” said chief marketing officer Evan Greene, with whom I spoke via phone.

However, the actual awards will only be viewable on CBS Sunday night — during the broadcast, past Grammy moments and some behind-the-scenes footage will be shown online instead. “We want it to be a two or three screen experience,” Greene said, with the third screen in this case being mobile, which the Grammys are getting closer to utilizing fully. This year’s iPhone app includes not just a trivia challenge, but a “Guess the Grammys” component, which allows fans to guess the winners in 21 of the 109 award categories and compete with their friends predictions, with all of the music from those 21 categories being available for purchase via iTunes. The hope is that by next year, the app will also include live-streaming.

While the lead-up to the awards is well-choreographed, however, the video strategy for the awards following the broadcast isn’t quite as clear. The Recording Academy owns the rights to the actual broadcast material, but archiving and distributing live performances for the web isn’t an instantaneous thing, due to the many rights issues involved. “It’s tough to point to a performance prior to the show and say it’ll be available,” Greene claimed. For one thing, even if the record label approves the song for online distribution, the artist might not be happy with how they performed and will thus not allow it to be distributed.

And when artists with different record labels and different representation perform together, such as last year when the Jonas Brothers and Stevie Wonder dueted, that only doubles the complications.

However, once the footage is approved they’ll have no shortage of distribution possibilities — including a brand-new Vevo channel that currently features footage from the nominations concert and classic Grammys performances.

The key to all of the Grammys pre-show work, though, is getting people to actually watch the Grammys when they air — on CBS, on TV. “It’s critical for us to reach out in a credible and organic way to fans where they’re actually living, because not all of them are watching TV. We want to try and migrate them back from the digital universe,” Greene said. The barometer for success there will be the ratings on Monday morning.

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IICD

If I Can Dream | MySpace Video

However, everyone currently auditioning will have to wait for one of the current five cast members to leave the show — in theory because they’ve gotten their big break. But once that happens, they’ll get to live in a luxurious house in the Hollywood Hills and have their activities monitored 24/7 by a bevy of webcams: according to a press release, viewers will be able to watch any camera in the house whenever they wish, with the footage compiled and distilled into 22-minute weekly episodes to be distributed by Hulu.

Details on the first five cast members have now been released, a crew of extremely photogenic young people ranging in age from 20-23. (While technically only one of them is focused on pursuing a modeling career, four of them have modeling backgrounds.) There’s little beyond photos right now to indicate whether or not the crew is likable or talented enough to sustain interest, but hopefully that’ll be quickly resolved when the show premieres in March.

You know that bit at the end of Pretty Woman where the guy on the street shouts “Welcome to Hollywood! What’s your dream? Everybody comes here; this is Hollywood, land of dreams”? Well, having lived in Hollywood for eight years, I can tell you that it’s less a land of dreams and more a land of dreamers. But there are still worse premises for a reality series.

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VideoEgg, comScore Partner on Tracking Ad Impact Offline; companies will launch a new product that allows brands to gauge the impact of online advertising on brick-and-mortar sales. (MediaPost)

YouTube Adds Facebook Friends; in addition to finding Gmail contacts on YouTube, users can now find and connect with people they know on Facebook. (YouTube blog)

Blockbuster Picks Widevine for DRM; DVD rental company will use Widevine’s DRM and video optimization technology for video delivered to internet-connected consumer electronic devices. (emailed release)

BrightRoll Launches Platform Partner Program; partners include advertising companies Adap.tv, Auditude, FreeWheel and LiveRail, as well as video player companies including Brightcove and thePlatform. (press release)

FiOS Adds HDNet to VOD Lineup; service includes more than 20 hours of HD programming from HDNet and more than 25 free movies from HDNet Movies per month. (Multichannel News)

Critical Media Hires Gilley as CTO; Vidavee founder and former Vignette CTO Tom Gilley will be responsible for product development on Critical Mention, ClipSyndicate and Syndicaster products. (emailed release)

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Next New Networks’ Bobby Miller Headed to Sundance; the Indy Mogul host’s short film TUB was accepted to the film festival. (Next New Networks blog)

Kyte Forms Strategic Partnership with LEVEL Studios; the digital agency will use Kyte’s online, social and mobile video management tools for its clients. (Kyte blog)

Married on MySpace Moves to SiTV; Endemol USA will spin off the Web series as a reality show that will air on the Latino broadcaster beginning in March. (Variety) See our previous coverage of the Web series here.

Immersive Media Powers 360-Degree Interactive Video; CBC/Radio Canada and MTV Networks take advantage of technology that enables viewer-controlled, 360-degree, live, full-motion, interactive video experiences. (InteractiveTV Today)

Pozzitive Launches a Facebook Page; the production company behind shows like Harry Enfield and Chums and Little Britain will host exclusive images, video and brand new material from top comedians on the social network. (emailed release)

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MySpace is evidently now all about the “socialization of content,” a phrase that Van Natta reportedly kept bringing up during his Web 2.0 talk today.

One thing’s for sure, between Vevo, MySpace and MTV’s music portal, there are no shortage of places to find your favorite music videos.

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Report: MySpace Plans to Launch New Vid Service; with some help from Hulu, the site will supposedly offer more feature films, TV shows and music videos. (CNET)

Study: Netflix Data Contradicts the Long Tail Theory; academic paper finds that people still mostly want to watch the hits. (The Hollywood Reporter)

12seconds Releases iPhone App; 12mail lets you send short video messages to your Facebook and Twitter contacts. (12mail iTunes link)

Republicans Mobilize to Block FCC Net Neutrality Plan; Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R.-Tex.) introduces amendment to prohibit the FCC from spending money to create “new regulatory mandates.” (Multichannel News) But at least NBC’s Jeff Zucker Likes Genachowski’s Plan; especially the bits about distinguishing between legal and illegal content. (Multichannel News)

Comcast Kicking Off Media Blitz for Fancast; the premium content portal looking to take on Hulu with prime-time TV ads. (Ad Age)

Nokeena Changes Name to Ankeena; switch made because of unspecified trademark issues. (Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal)

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The New Mexico band Brokencyde, whose music belongs to the Screamo-crunk genre (don’t worry, I hadn’t heard of it, either), made a three-part web series about the recording of their first studio album. Even if Screamo-crunk isn’t exactly to your tastes, it’s still a funny introduction to the band and its members. NSFW for the language and the marijuana.

Meanwhile, Paramour covered Kings of Leon’s Use Somebody at BBC Radio’s Live Lounge last weekend, and a video of said cover has been viral all week. It’s a solid rendition, given greater authenticity by the video’s documentary-esque style.

And nothing has gotten a song stuck in my head this week like this special gift from the Black Eyed Peas to Oprah Winfrey (sponsored by T-Mobile). To commemorate her talk show’s 24th season, they performed a modified version of I’ve Gotta Feeling live on the streets of Chicago, and brought along a massive dancing flash mob (which we’ve seen before). It lacks any real authenticity, and some of these lyrics are the worst I’ve ever heard (“Mazel tov”?!?). But you have to admire the amount of organization the event required. And while this was clearly meant for airing on Oprah’s show, it’s clearly meant for viral consumption.

So yeah, I’ll be watching the VMAs as well. But let’s see if anything they pull off can top this.

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Data released from Ipsos MediaCT today shows that the awareness of Hulu among digital video users jumped to 41 percent in April of 2009 from just 9 percent in September of 2008. Meanwhile, reported usage of the site rose to 14 percent in April from 3 percent in September.

Of course, advertising isn’t the sole reason for Hulu’s growth. The site has made it super easy to share its content, there’s been tons of press coverage, and the growth in watching TV online has been part of an overall industry trend. Today’s findings were the latest nugget of info from Ipsos’ MOTION study, which also found that streaming full-length TV shows and movies online soared in popularity during that same September-April time frame.

Further reinforcing YouTube’s dominance in the online video world, Ipsos found that awareness of that site had grown to 87 percent from 83 percent, with usage rising to 56 percent from 49 percent. But the rising streams, as it were, didn’t lift all boats. MySpace dropped in terms of both awareness (to 46 percent from 54 percent) and usage (to 9 percent from 13 percent).

The download side saw a small uptick, with awareness of Apple’s iTunes increasing to 49 percent from 46 percent, and usage edging up to just 10 percent from 8 percent. Though we wonder how they phrased the awareness question, since anyone with an iPod should at least be aware of iTunes the music store.

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MySpace Video, which for a time was called MySpace TV and featured lots of original windowed programming like Prom Queen, lonelygirl15 and quarterlife as well as premium content from partners like Hulu, has reverted to its prior name. It only has one original program running at the moment: Married on MySpace. The wedding reality show seems to be doing OK, though recent views are down from over a million per episode to around 100,000. (Show creators like Marshall Herskovitz have noted the immense power of being featured on MySpace and the letdown when you are not.) And MySpace only worked out a deal to give Married social viewing capabilities partway through the season.

Murdoch still has a significant asset to work with (though personally I can only get videos to load and play properly on MySpace if I click my heels together fast enough). comScore lists MySpace as the second-most popular U.S. video site by streams (to YouTube, of course), while Nielsen ranks it fourth below YouTube, Hulu and Yahoo.

Compared with other social-networking sites, MySpace maintains an advantage in terms of number of videos viewed per month — though Facebook at this point has more total people viewing video. That’s because MySpace focuses on entertainment video while Facebook emphasizes personal sharing.

Though we thought MySpace had the best-quality stream of Michael Jackson’s memorial out there, a representative for the site declined to give viewership numbers for it — something it has readily offered for past events. It’s not clear if that’s because the numbers were bad, if the streaming itself was poorly promoted, or if things are just disorganized given recent layoffs and reshuffling.

The last two MySpace Video/TV PR contacts we’ve worked with are no longer with the company. A rep declined to comment on Murdoch’s WSJ-delivered missive.

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This is the first ClipSync implementation of a multipart deal with Fox Interactive. The social stuff will probably be most useful during Married on MySpace‘s live finale next week — the combination of a live show, interactive voting, and a social network is pretty killer — if you like the subject matter, that is! Update: The finale is actually August 6, and it won’t be live. ClipSync would not tell us how it is being paid, but it seems likely it’s ad revenue split.

ClipSync has similar functionality available on CBS.com and TV.com for their television programming. I had actually profiled ClipSync in depth for a recent longer report about the state of social TV that I wrote for GigaOM Pro, our new subscription research service (only $79 per year, you should check it out!). Here’s some more information about ClipSync from that piece, which also has case studies on Integra5′s text-to-TV chat service and Facebook’s integration of existing social relationships into video experiences:

According to ClipSync’s internal testing, when given the option of watching a program socially or alone, 80 percent of viewers prefer the company of other users, even if they don’t want to interact with them. The most participatory content seems to be daytime shows — aka soap operas — accounting for 20 percent of users and 51 percent of total in-session interaction. Dramatic plot twist overload is only part of it; a big factor in soap opera interactivity is that there’s daily fresh content, said ClipSync CEO Itzik Cohen. When CBS launched Clipsync on archival Star Trek episodes, fan interest was minimal.

ClipSync has actually been around for three years now, but spent its initial time as a destination viewing site, where visitors could use similar functionality to watch YouTube, Google Video and Metacafe videos. After that didn’t get much traction, the company turned to white-labeling its service. Now it either charges a monthly per-user license fee or splits ad revenue.

ClipSync is under pressure to show it can add value for its network partners, especially since competitors haven’t fared so well. Lycos provided a similar “viewing party” service for some ABC Family programming last year, but it has since been discontinued. We haven’t been able to get a hold of anyone to tell us what went wrong. Lycos still offers its own branded version of the service, Lycos Cinema, where users can pay to rent movies and watch them with friends in a virtual theater setting.

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• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks
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