(13 September 2007 6:00 pm)

MUMBAI: In a bid to keep users away from sampling consumer generated video sharing sites, News Corp's social networking platform MySpace is in the process of creating a web only drama series.

In an exclusive deal, it has signed producers of the Leonardo Di Caprio starrer Blood Diamond Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick to distribute via Myspace, a series of 8-minute videos called 'Quarterlife'.

The duo had also produced Emmy award winning TV shows in the 1980s called Thirtysomething and My So-called Life.

This is not the first time that MySpace is using an internet video series produced by Hollywood. In April, News Corp's MySpace TV premiered daily episodes of Prom Queen, a web-exclusive teen series produced by Disney chief executive Michael Eisner's Vuguru Studio.

However, while earlier productions bear the look of prosumer video clips, MySpace is touting Quarterlife as the first to use 'network quality' production values.

Herskovitz and Zwick are producing 36 eight-minute episodes of Quarterlife, a scripted drama centred around the lives of six characters.

Under the terms of the deal, starting 11 November, two episodes will debut every week on MySpace TV and it will have exclusive rights for the first 24 hours after each episode is posted.

MySpace users and bloggers on other sites will also be able to 'embed' the webisodes in their pages by pasting in a small chunk of code, as they can with video clips on other sites such as YouTube, Blip.tv and DailyMotion.