MYSPACE TV: News Corp’s $500 M loss becomes the future of Entertainment?

The future of entertainment, sure. But first, a quick history lesson:

Long before anybody knew who Mark Zuckerberg was, everybody was becoming friends with Tom.

7 years ago (Jesus I’m old) I lived in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, nestled snugly into a cocoon without regular internet and email much less networking sites. When I came down from the hill to work for a surf company, all the lowlanders made fun of me for not having heard of this MySpace thing. In turn, I made fun of them for messing around with something like that, what with it “Girl’s dorm” ambiance and how much it seemed to be just a time-suck. Within a few months I set my first MySpace page. A month after that I learned how to code my background. A month after that NewsCorp. bought Intermix media (MySpace’s parent company) And within a year I, among many others, was championing it as the future of marketing and networking within youth and hip culture.

Tom was the figurehead of MySpace, a cool geek who was also your first friend when you signed up to the site. A co-worker of mine, while we were on a promotional surf tour, showed me how he could use his MySpace page to find people in the local area with shared interests, even going so far as to pick up girls over the site. Soon I was friends with hundreds of scantily-clad nubile building followings and internet presences via sexy half-naked pictures plastered all over their MySpace pages (Forbidden comes to mind, and mini-drunk Tila Tequila actually got her own reality show from her MySpace popularity, 16 minutes ago).

At the same time all my friends still in college had started using this thing Facebook. The next year, with MySpace still king, Facebook finally dropped the requirement that its users have a “.edu” email address. In 2008 I lobbied the teen retailer I was working for at the time to meet with the MySpace folks about buying a sponsored page as a marketing expense. It came to tens of thousands of dollars a month and so we took a more organic approach, created a false “personality” who repped our brand through the site and hoped the MySpace police didn’t bust us for being a corporate entity without a formal sponsorship (yes, they had such rules back then - and might still do).

Articles started coming out talking about how Facebook was for jocks and geeks, professionals and "goody two-shoes" while MySpace was for artists and free spirits as it allowed greater customization of the page, allowed people to add playlists to their pages from a massive database that included every artist from super-mogul Jay-Z to a ratty little local group like TheBrass Uncle Band. I remember making fun of some of my Irish friends for leaving Bebo for Facebook instead of MySpace. I think I said something about them being “squares”.

Of course I again ate my words (admittedly I’m mostly a luddite and have no illusions otherwise – my goal in life is to someday have nothing but a rotary phone and a hard line Internet connection to the outside world). By Spring 2009 I checked my MySpace page once a month, at most, just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. And I wasn’t. My Facebook page, on the other hand, had become a form of communication and networking on par with my email.

I signed into my MySpace page once or twice in the past 2 years, mostly to pull off the old pictures I’d loaded into my profile and lost when my computer crashed. Oh, and I think I looked up a song to play at work (before Spotify, of course).

This last June, MySpace sold for $35M to ad company SpecificMedia and during the big announcement, Specific kept on touting the fact that Justin Timberlake, in an ironic play of life imitating art (in case you were under a rock last year, he played Napster founder Sean Parker, a co-owner of Facebook, in the movie THE SOCIAL NETWORK), was a co-owner of the foundering social networking company and had some ideas about what to do with their millions of songs and mostly inactive accounts.

But now it's time to put the past behind us, goddammit. It's 2012. It's time to cast our eyes stoically towards the future.

Just yesterday, at the Consumer Electronics show that new idea was unveiled by the bearded Mr. Timberlake-Biel-to-be himself. 

“The future of Myspace is about what you’re going to do. About who you’re going to become. Myspace TV is the first foray into that future."

MySpace TV? In the immortal words of Borat, “Whaaaaa?”

"We're ready to take television and entertainment to the next step by upgrading it to the social networking experience. Why text or email your friends to talk about your favorite programs after they've aired when you could be sharing the experience with real-time interactivity from anywhere across the globe?" the boy-bander-cum-legitimate-pop-star continued.

MySpace.com had this to say about its new venture:

"Myspace TV: a new dimension to television
This spring Myspace will bring you a new way to experience all the shows you love. With a growing line up of broadcast and on-demand programs, Myspace TV puts you in control. Whether you're watching on a TV, laptop, tablet or smartphone, Myspace TV allows you to discover, share and comment on all the programs you and your friends are watching.

Making TV Social
Let's face it, TV is best when shared. From the big game, to the red carpet or just the latest episode of your favorite show, Myspace TV makes TV social. Find out what's hot, what's trending, what your friends are watching or even what your favorite celebrity just commented on. Why just 'watch' TV when you can experience TV? Myspace TV gives you more information about your favorite shows, videos and artists, and provides you real-time engagement with your friends to get you closer to the shows you love.

It Starts with Music
With the largest library of music, including more than 42 million songs and over 100,000 videos, Myspace TV begins with music. Launching with a wide range of music channels, we are working hard to add more broadcast and original programming to the line up all the time."

And how will they build on that? Reportedly a partnership with Panasonic will facilitate expansion but since Panasonic is in no way, shape, or form a content producer, how the fuck will that help? They'll provide a new set-top box to buy that would allow us to watch MySpace on our flat screens but how will they get the rights for TV programming, especially as more networks get protective over the shows that cost them tens of millions of dollars and every year bring in less and less ad revenue? What good is a set top box delivering little more than the "Sexy Back" video and open domain PBS programming?

It’s ambitious, I’ll give them that. And it makes sense that MySpace, which originally started out as a place where new bands could network and share their music with a larger audience (before MySpace shifted their focus to signing up teenage girls who just wanted to post pictures of themselves in the underwear), return to its original mission, entertainment innovation through proletariat connectivity. Hell, that’s been the key to this multi-billion user-generated-content/social networking thing, whether you’re talking about opinionated amateurs able to share their opinions with the world via blogs, protesters who can gather together several thousand people with one Tweet, musicians who can email a link to their demos instead of having to dub dozens of mixtapes and send them around town or dancers who can create a try-out without having to wait in line for hours outside Millenium Dance Complex. 

My wife likes to watch football games and give commentary; more often it’s a reference to the sizes of linemen’s asses or how she only likes football now because the yellow lines give her something to look forward to. If this site works as they’re promising and we can watch games with friends from all over, I could see her becoming a bit like Fred Willard in BEST IN SHOW, a voice that extends beyond the primary (in this case male-dominated) audience to women who never much cared for football. Maybe this could give women a forum to discuss the ancillaries while their husbands and boyfriends scream at the TV.

Or at the least I can talk to my dad and my brothers and my wife’s childhood friends as we all tune into another epic Ravens game. 

And I can talk to my brother in NY as we catch a new episode of IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY. Or my marketing friends in Orange County as we catch the new season of MAD MEN in March. Or at least that seems to be what they’re trying to do.

And Facebook was reported as having lost 6 million US and Canadian users in June. Maybe it’s a general backlash against having one’s whole life open for the world to view and intrude. Maybe it’s because Facebook has lost its cool factor ever since it became as omnipresent as email and Wall Street demons began preparing to package it like mortgage-backed securities (imagine if their $100 Billion IPO value drops to $6 Billion a la MySpace – a $94 Billion loss of wealth would sure turn around this recovery pretty damn quick). Or maybe it’s because the Internet moves fast and Facebook’s had a PRETTY, pretty good run. 

Either way, MySpace TV, as proposed, could actually revolutionize the way we watch, digest, and discuss media. Wait, I thought Netflix did that? No, Hulu, that’s the ticket, yeah. Wait, what about GoogleTV?

With Timberlake, MySpace, and even the suits from Specific EXTREMELY vague, it leads me to believe right now they’re writing a check and hoping they have enough in the account when it hits. And if we learned anything from Google’s struggles in this area (and they have Sony behind them, a content creator as well as reigning king of entertainment technology), well, all I can say is good luck, MySpace. Good luck.

Though maybe first you want to redesign that logo. What's with that ugly symbol for a space replacing the word "Space"? What idiot in your creative department thought adding a hieroglyph into your name would somehow RAISE MySpace's hip quotient? Who do you think you are, MySpace, Prince?

- Ryan