Big Guns Battle Video Sharing With Free TV Shows

TV biggies NBC Universal and News Corp. are teaming up to hit YouTube with the full force of their their combined TV content, offered online for free. Starting this summer, AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft's MSN and News Corp. subsidiary MySpace will hope to win over internet users (and the advertising that goes with them) with shows like 24 and Heroes.

In making the content free but copyright-protected,  TV execs may have have taken a lesson from the failure of the music industry to keep file-sharing networks from distributing protected intellectual property without permission. "You have to give consumers a legitimate way to get content," says News Corp. president Peter Chernin. (More YouTube stories.)