News Corp., the owner of MySpace, has decided it should stop sitting on its butt and start doing something with the enormous community that is MySpace. Online video is where it’s at, and MySpace will directly challenge YouTube and others with MySpace TV, which is basically a rebranded MySpace Videos service. NYTimes says the new service will launch thursday.

The questions that are immediately rising are this:

a) Will MySpace screw it up like they did with MySpace News (which was touted as a Digg killer and it didn’t amount to absolutely anything)?
b) Is MySpace’s admittedly huge community willing to build, or do they prefer to link, comment and embed stuff from other places?

In the case of a), although a screwup is always possible, MySpace will probably be able to get it right. After all, it’s not that complicated, hence there are hundreds of video sharing sites around, many of them quite successful. But, every detail they screw up will cost them dearly, and the recent MySpace News debacle reminds that they are, indeed, capable of completely screwing up on all major points - features, design, and concept.

On second point, it’s again a matter of smart integration; if they make it very easy to MySpacers to upload videos and embed them on their profiles then the MySpace community will soon create a worthy adversary to YouTube. If only a small fraction of MySpace visitors - say, 1% - decided to upload a video every month, it would still amount to 500.000 new monthly videos. Try creating that kind of momentum with a new site, and you’ll see that it’s not that easy.

Another point worth mentioning is that, according to NYTimes, MySpace plans to focus on professional content, and not on sharing (this means more rap videos and less videos of your hamster dancing). This is all nice and dandy, but they need to tap into the need of MySpacers to share their own amateur videos, because that’s what most of them want.