Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

News Corp. is on a video roll. MySpace TV is set to debut tomorrow and its premium video joint venture with NBC Universal is making a multi-million dollar upfront ad sales splash, according to the man integral to the JV sales charge: Kevin McGurn.

McGurn addressed “disruption” in the online video space this morning at the Advertising Research Foundation’s Audience Measurement 2.0 conference underway in New York City.

The NBC-Fox JV sold $2 million in advertising to ten charter advertisers, including General Motors and Cisco, within four hours upon the announcement of the venture in March, McGurn proudly underscored. What‘s more, online video ad sales for the JV in the current upfront market is “extremely favorable,” and the yet to be named and launched high-end video property is already “highly valued” and doing millions of dollars in business, he indicated.

McGurn believes it is incumbent upon networks to “focus on the content” because “the audiences will come along with it.” McGurn believes the NBC-Fox joint video entertainment venture is poised for success as “demand for high-end video inventory exceeds supply.” Professionally produced, episodic long form content is the focus of the NBC-Fox joint venture, McGurn said.

The NBC-Fox joint video venture is to formally launch its video destination site and distribution network in late summer in advance of the fall season. Extensive research is currently being conducted in order to gauge “users’ threshold for pain in advertising as a tradeoff for free content,” McGurn indicated.

All manner of video ads are being explored: “Takeovers, bottom-thirds, video during pre-roll for good exposure and then receding into some form of persistent background messaging…” In “experimenting,” advertising effectiveness and user acceptance are evaluated.

Thousands of hours of full-length TV programming, clips and movies, representing premium content from close to twenty networks and major television and film studios will be featured by the joint venture, according to News Corp. and NBC Universal. Distribution portal partners include AOL, Yahoo, MSN and MySpace.

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN