If you didn't know it already, the Toronto International Film Festival is now going on - and it seems the entire city has a really bad case of celebrity-itis. (evidence: Brad Pitt press conference/love-in) In the Before Children (BC) era, my wife and I used to see a handful of films, most of which never appeared at movies theatres let alone the local Blockbuster. These days, I'm lucky to see one film (usually the Rogers Gala - this year it was "Penelope"). Given there are so many great films at the festival, wouldn't it be great if you could access them on the Web after the festival is over? Putting aside all those tricky technical, distribution and copyright issues, it would give a much wider audience the opportunity to see movies, and provide film makers/distributors with another source of revenue. This idea seems like such a win-win, no-brainer that I'm surprised it hasn't been explored earlier. And with Apple planning to offer movie downloads via iTunes, it's an idea whose time has come. (For Steve Jobs fans, check out Om Malik's post: "Is Steve Jobs Bill Gates 2.0?").

News Corp. must be feeling pretty chuffed about its prescient acquisition of MySpace last year. How else to judge a here's-the-facts-ma'am statement from News Corp. chief operating officer Peter Chernin, who said at an industry conference Tuesday that MySpace may be looking at creating a YouTube-like service. (Source: Multichannel News)

“If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether its YouTube, whether it’s Flicker, whether it’s Photobucket or any of the next-generation Web applications, almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace,” he said. “There’s no reason why we can’t build a parallel business.”

There are a couple ways to judge Chernin's statement. One is misplaced arrogance: sure, MySpace has more than 100 million members but we're talking about fickle people who will jump on the next hot social networking service in a flash. Some smart polling company should spend some time on a university campus to talk about MySpace. They may come away with some surprising data that suggest MySpace's momentum is slowing down. It is also possible Chernin and News Corp. realize MySpace has become one of the Web 2.0 platforms so it's doing nothing more than floating a trial balloon about a video service much like it casually tossed out the idea of a MySpace magazine last month. MySpace's growing membership and clout may give it the power to pursue a variety of strategic options.

For more thoughts on MySpace, check out Peter Cashmore, who talks about how there is already a MySpace ecosystem of add-on services that may fall by the wayside if MySpace decides to imitate them. In some ways, Peter's post reminds me of Skype vs. its third-party developers. Skype has flourished because there is a fertile add-on environment that makes Skype that much more useful. The problem, however, is when Skype (or MySpace, for that matter) looks at third-party services making money and decides to get into the market themselves. Rick Segal, meanwhile, thinks MySpace is "brilliant" as it drives to create the new AOL. Rob Hyndman and Mathew Ingram also weigh in.