MySpace, the social networking site owned by News Corp. is set to start offering video clips from members’ pages, as well as professionally produced video to mobile devices that can support video starting on Wednesday, according to a press report by Reuters. The professional part of the video content will be offered by third parties such as celebrity gossip site TMZ, the National Hockey League, and National Geographic magazine.

The service will be free for all users, and will be supported by advertisements. This maneuver is going to make MySpace the first social network to have a mobile video streaming feature, and is intended to capitalize on the fast-growing, if small, mobile advertising market.

"These are the big guys doing it, and they're going to make some noise about it," said David Card, a media analyst at Forrester Research. He went on to call the deal medium-sized in terms of significance. "Mobile is one of those things where people keep saying, 'Is next year going to be the year of mobile'?"

The video from MySpace will be streamed, or sent from the social network’s pages instead of downloaded onto mobile phones. This unfortunately for Apple fans will make the clips incompatible with the iPhone which only runs downloaded video and does not support streaming. Devices on which the service is available include the BlackBerry Bold, Palm Centro, Motorola Q9, LG Voyager, Nokia N95 and Samsung Instinct.

MySpace is collaborating with RipCode, a company specializing in video-transcoding to make the clips available on a plethora of devices, each with their on specifications on how to handle video streaming.