Giants form NewTube to take on GooTube

IF YOU CAN'T BEAT 'EM, get your biggest mates together and beat the bejeezus out of ‘em, to adapt an old saying.

And so it came to pass that, having made little of their individual video efforts, MSN, Yahoo and AOL are allying in a 'Get YouTube' offensive.

The internet behemoths announced plans yesterday to create a new video-distribution plan with News Corp. and NMC Universal as content partners. The missing portal, natch, is the company wags have called GooTube and the same wags are calling the new effort NewTube. Oh, you wags.

Not that anybody ever admits that they are out to shoot the golden child, of course. News Corp. Peter Chernin said the grouping was "obviously not a YouTube killer". That's right: it's as not-obvious as the non-obvious nose on your face. There's no nose here, move along folks.

The collaboration calls for News Corp./Fox and NBC content to be distributed on ad-sponsored MSN, Yahoo and AOL sites. Content will include the excellent, if risibly plotted, Heroes; The Simpsons; and conveyor-belt Hollywood crap like The Devil Wears Prada.

The problem for these big swinging dicks of the the media and portal worlds is that ganging-up tends to have poor form when it comes to taking on more focused organisations. Readers of a certain age will remember reading about the ACE consortium effort to "get Sun" - or, more significantly, they probably won't. µ