Look out YouTube. News Corp. and NBC Universal are launching an Internet video distribution network, said to be the largest of its kind.

AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo! will be the new site's initial distribution partners. Their users, who represent 96% of the monthly U.S. unique users on the Internet, will have unlimited access to the site. Charter advertisers include Cadbury Schweppes, Cisco, Esurance, Intel and General Motors. They are still seeking out more distribution partners.

At launch, full episodes and clips from current hit shows, including Heroes, 24, 30 Rock, The Simpsons, The Tonight Show and Prison Break, among others, plus hits from the studios' television libraries, will be available free, on an ad-supported basis. Each distribution partner will give users a unique place — matching the look and feel of their own web sites — to compile playlists and so on.

"This partnership... will allow hundreds of millions of our consumers to tune into a vast library of high-quality, safe and legal online video," said Kevin Johnson, president of the platform and services division at Microsoft. The key word there, of course, is "legal." Besides a $1 billion lawsuit from Viacom, YouTube-owner Google has received sharp criticism from rival Microsoft, which recently accused it of having a "cavalier" attitude toward copyright law.

The new company will be located in New York and Los Angeles. A management team led by NBC's chief digital officer George Kliavkoff, along with a group of execs from NBC and News Corp., will work together to launch the site.

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