It’s been a long time since MySpace was just a Web site for chatty teenagers and underground bands promoting their next gig. It’s a multimedia empire embraced by mainstream communications companies as a platform for broadcasting their content and messages. Of course, video is part of that mix, and it’s coming to a smart phone near you thanks to MySpace and RipCode.

The MySpace beta mobile video initiative uses RipCode’s On-Demand Video Transcoding technology to optimize the delivery of videos users have uploaded or tagged as favorites for an improved mobile viewing experience. With real-time transcoding, MySpace can easily support several different handsets even though they require different combinations of codecs, bit rates, and resolutions, according to the companies.

“Video is a natural next step for us,” said John Faith, vice president and general manager of mobile for MySpace. “MySpace will continue to grow our video library as we increase delivery channels in order to keep pace with our users’ accelerating desire for video consumption.”

While progressive download would provide support for the popular Apple iPhone, MySpace chose RTSP-streaming since research indicates that most of the mobile community now has streaming-enabled devices, especially in the United States. And manufacturers are rolling out more of these devices, like the BlackBerry Bold, Nokia N95, and Samsung Instinct.

The MySpace Mobile site, m.myspace.com, gets about 3 billion worldwide page views per month from more than 10 million monthly unique users. With this development, 100% of the users’ uploaded videos and most premium content—including branded channels like TMZ, the National Hockey League, National Geographic, and the Onion—are now available on mobile devices around the world.

MySpace is transcoding video on-demand, so there is no need to store its entire video library in multiple mobile formats, saving significant hardware, energy, and storage resources. It also is a more efficient, effective, and eco-friendly method for extending video the MySpace mobile community, according to the companies.

Additionally, Juniper Research expects mobile-operator revenues from user-generated content will increase tenfold over the next five years, rising from $576 million in 2007 to $5.74 billion by 2012. The research company also says that social networking services will account for 50% of the total mobile operator revenue, with the number of active mobile social network subscribers rising from 14 million in 2007 to 600 million in 2012.

• MySpace
• RipCode

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