MySpace Mobile users across the globe can now enjoy the social network's video content from their video-enabled mobile devices.

MySpace has partnered with RipCode for this. The mobile video initiative is MySpace's way of bettering the mobile user experience. Users will now be able view all videos' they've uploaded or have marked as a favorite.

"This is a huge step for our mobile product offering and we are always looking to expand our mobile functionality and increasing our content -- video on mobile is a step in that direction," said John Faith, general manager and vice president of Mobile for MySpace, Los Angeles.

Our longer-term mobile strategy is to become enablers of social content and the mobile social portal that creates contextual relevancy around content," he said. "Users want to discover new music, videos and other content by learning about what their friends are consuming and recommending.

"The engagement on this is very powerful and we believe by adding video to our mobile offering will increase our mobile engagement."

Users will be able to view videos they've uploaded or have marked as a favorite, including premium content on most of our branded channels (TMZ, National Hockey League, National Geographic, The Onion, College Humor, etcetera).

MySpace mobile videos are rolling out in beta globally, with support for the most popular streaming-enabled mobile devices (BlackBerry Bold, Palm Centro, Motorola Q9, LG Voyager, Nokia N95, and Samsung Instinct).

"Users are increasingly interested in portability and on-the-go access to content, so video is the natural next step for us in mobile," Mr. Faith said.

The MySpace Mobile site at http://m.myspace.com receives approximately 3 billion worldwide page views per month with over 10 million monthly unique users.

Combining the popularity of the MySpace mobile site with its vast online video library creates a compelling and dynamic mobile environment.

In order to meet ever-increasing video demand, MySpace uses RipCode's On-Demand Video Transcoding technology to optimize mobile video delivery and give users an improved mobile video experience.

Real-time transcoding enables MySpace to easily support several different handsets even though they require different combinations of codecs, bit rates, and resolutions.

"MySpace members are increasingly using video and want to take their experiences with them offline wherever they are," Mr. Faith said. "We are responding to users clamoring for mobile video with this new service.

"Also, the market is ripe for us to allow this functionality," he said. "There has been heavy smartphone adoption by consumers, not just for business purposes. This consumer smartphone adoption is good for MySpace.

"Also, richer graphical interface on phones makes the experience more compelling to the consumer."

This raises the consumer's expectation on what they can do with a phone.

In addition, all you can eat data plans are becoming more common, so it's not as cost prohibitive to use MySpace. All of this points to it being the right time in the market for MySpace to enable this functionality.

Market analysis firm Juniper Research forecasts mobile carrier revenues from user-generated content will increase tenfold over the next five years, rising from $576 million in 2007 to $5.74 billion by 2012.

According to Juniper Research, social networking services will account for 50 percent of the total mobile carrier revenue, with the number of active mobile social network subscribers accelerating from 14 million in 2007 to 600 million in 2012.

All of MySpace users' video content is now available on mobile devices.

According to Frost & Sullivan, streaming mobile video services constitute the bulk of current U.S. mobile video service offerings.

Accessing and viewing video from mobile devices is a data intensive service.

MySpace mobile users are advised to consult their mobile data plan to avoid excessive fees.

MySpace mobile video quality, as with all mobile services, is dependent on individual device capabilities and network speed and connection.

"We have partnered with RipCode to provide this service to our users on our mobile WAP site," Mr. Faith said. "Because we are transcoding video on-demand, it eliminates the need to store the entire MySpace video library in multiple mobile formats, saving us significant hardware, energy and storage resources."