It has been speculated for some time that a handful of major media giants were discussing the possibility of creating their own video sharing site to challenge the likes of YouTube. That appears to no longer be speculation as the Los Angeles Times is reporting today that News Corp. and NBC Universal are likely to announce their plans on creating such a site as soon as today.

The LA Times reports that the new website could be up by as early as this summer and would offer content from their top TV shows including "The Office", "24", and "Heroes". Many of these are not even available from their current Internet TV offerings.

We'll keep an eye out for more details as they emerge.

From our perspective, this all seems like a lot of hype as we can't see how any venture like this will detract from the popularity of YouTube or any other video sharing site. The appeal of user-generated sites is quite different than that of major broadcasters. Regardless, we will be interested to see how they incorporate the social networking aspect into their offering.