EU regulators waved through on June 21 plans between media titans NBC Universal and News Corp to set up an online video website aimed at rivaling the wildly popular YouTube owned by Google. The European Commission "granted clearance" to the joint venture after a "simplified" review, reserved for deals not expected to cause competition problems, the top EU antitrust watchdog said.
The new site has agreements with Time Warner's AOL, Microsoft's MSN, News Corp's MySpace and Yahoo, which will be the new site's initial distribution partners and who capture an audience representing 96 percent of US Internet users.