Some v-e-e-e-r-y big media companies want to build something to compete with YouTube. However, the numerous tentacles of the various players could make playing nice together almost impossible.

Some excerpts from the Dec. 18 NYT story:

When YouTube emerged as one of the Internet’s most popular Web sites last year, many TV executives dismissed it as a flash in the pan — and a largely illegal one at that. But after Google agreed to pay $1.65 billion for YouTube in October, they adopted a radically different stance: suddenly they wanted to take it on.

Now, a handful of giant media companies, like NBC Universal, the News Corporation, Viacom and possibly CBS, are close to announcing a new Web site that will feature some of their best-known television programming and other clips in an attempt to build a business for distributing video on the Internet to rival YouTube. The new business could be announced as soon as this week.

Whether or not the new venture goes ahead — and such a collaboration among these companies would be nearly unprecedented — the flurry of activity around its creation underscores the complex and high-stakes dance that media companies are having with new online outlets for their wares, and the potent combination of Google and YouTube in particular.

Executives from the companies have been in intense negotiations over the ownership and management structure of the new entity — which is as yet unnamed — and the talks could continue until the end of the year or fall apart entirely.

“They really want to do it,” one executive briefed on the talks said of the partners involved. However, this executive predicted, doubting the ability of the competitors to play well together: “Ten minutes after they do it they’ll want to kill themselves.” ...

... Each partner in the proposed YouTube competitor brings its own agendas and potential conflicts. For instance, the News Corporation also owns both the Fox television network and the popular MySpace social networking Web site.

Several people involved in the proposed venture said that the News Corporation’s desire to protect its MySpace asset from losing its audience to YouTube was a big driver behind the group. However, any ties to MySpace could present a point of friction with Viacom, whose MTV competes with it online.