Online TV from Sony

Sony (NYSE: SNE) has decided that the next wave of TV programming viewing will come on the internet. The company is about to launch "Minisode Network" on News Corp's (NYSE: NWS) MySpace. The programming will feature old episodes [subscription required] of several series including "The Partridge Family" which have been cut down to about five minutes.

The company also plans to launch an overhaul of Grouper, a video sharing site it bought several months ago.

Sony's new MySpace effort will be sponsored by Honda (NYSE: HMC). Commercials will be cut down to eight seconds.

It is hard to see how the enterprise can be a success. Finding videos among the millions of posting on MySpace will be difficult enough. On top of that, MySpace users tend to be fairly young. Why they would want to watch recycled shows from the 1970s is anyone's guess, but it would appear to be a failure in the making.

The Sony effort is just another old media company taking a stab at taking programming which no longer has any use and posting it on the web.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.